“Worn surfaces, the mark hands have left on things, the aura, sometimes tragic and always wistful, of these objects, lend to reality a fascination not to be taken lightly.” Pablo Neruda
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by the accumulated possessions of deceased relatives—remnants of the past were omnipresent. I used to think it was because my family lived through the Great Depression and threw nothing away but over time, I believe it was a way of holding space for loved ones. I was aware that specific items "had belonged" to people I knew, through stories of family history: the deceased occupied a place in our home. When my grandmother (Nonna) left this world, I began to collect items that once belonged to her. My close relationship with her intensified my desire to keep her possessions. Her nightgowns were especially poignant. The worn areas, marks of where her body had been, emit an aura of her presence akin to a photographic negative. The nightgowns were by beginning.
The series Soon This Space Will Be Too Small was a response to her death—but I have realized death speaks differently with each encounter and this was one singular response. A response that reached beyond “death’s specifics”.
The Ebb photographs in this series emerged from what I would call a private performance. Accompanied by my mother, I brought my Nonna’s bedsheets to the water’s edge, symbolically washing them —- releasing that last sleep to the waters that will ceaselessly move. These were the sheets she slept on for the last time. As the rain came down while I photographed the sheets being moved by the water’s ebb and flow, they transformed—just as the fabric of her nightgowns had—revealing movement and stillness, presence and absence. It was an act of questioning — of release, a symbolic letting go.
The nightgowns and sheets helped me establish a portal to the ideas that exist beyond the object, constituting a kind of threshold, a point of departure.