Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

This is a sneak peek of a project I’ve been working on for over five years now. I’m hoping to finish it this fall / winter. Stay tuned for updates… On December 1st 2016 my parents will move out of their house. My family has called this place home for almost 40 years and most of my childhood memories are intertwined with it. This house, although it will continue to exist, will not be part of us and our story any more. The familiar smells and sounds will disappear and be replaced, and somebody else will feel for the light switches at night. My parents will move as it has gotten to be too much. Bruises and broken jaws were signs that things just couldn’t continue. The falls, we don’t remember exactly when they started, the head spinning dizziness along with the disorientation. Those were the first signs. A blank expression on my mother’s face, a joke she didn’t quite get, a comment that didn’t fit, a door or an entrance she was so sure existed – but only in her head. We tried to ignore it and couldn’t believe it, as we had seen and experienced it all before: about twenty five years ago, when my grandmother started to show the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Over a span of five years my mother saw her mother slowly disappear and turn into a person my teenage self didn’t quite know how to approach, to treat, to love. My mother and my grandmother were very close their whole lives. Best friends, lookalikes, partners in crime. I sometimes wonder if sharing the same fate, the same disease, makes my mother feel closer to her own mother again. And I also wonder if, one day, I too will feel closer to my mother again, when it might be my turn to forget. These days we try to remember the things she is forgetting, but also try to remember her, the mother she used to be. She is different, changes every day. She is sad, in denial, sometimes ashamed, often angry. The world has turned against her. She talks about the past. Not the recent one, not even when we were little, but about her childhood and often about the homes of her childhood. Sometimes you can fool yourself, as she reappears again. The mother we used to know: her humor, her care, her undivided attention for us. For a short while, sometimes for the length of a whole conversation, she makes sense and we all want it to last. But it doesn’t and we have to remind ourselves that these moments will go, too. How does one go about losing a mother? How does one go about losing a childhood home? As an artist I use my photography to navigate myself through this loss. Over the course of the past five years, every time I’ve come home for a visit, I’ve taken pictures. This is how the project, Threadbare, came to life. This work expresses my thoughts and emotions around memory and loss and is an homage to the people and objects that lived in our house. It looks at the things that “run in the family”: not only the genes or the physical objects, but also the psychological components of heritage and belonging. It is an homage to my mother, who is – although physically still here – slowly leaving us.