part of the SALLY project

WORKSHOP: Considering imagery, symbolism and authenticity in your work

Imagine you have a dream about a ghost. Not just any ghost, the ghost of a girl who appears only from the waist down. It would be a bit unnerving, no? Imagine she appears in your dreams on a recurring basis, scaring you not because she is a ghost, but because she represents something that you aren’t ready to confront.

The ghost girl appeared to me in dreams until the night I stood up to her in a way that was so ferocious that I woke myself up. Intuitively I know that the ghost girl is connected to stories of real women that have haunted me in other ways. Catherine Fay was a 19th century ancestor who experienced the traumatic loss of a child, and in response dedicated her life to caring for discarded and orphaned children. This in spite of opposition from some in the wealthy community around her that questioned her motives and tried to sabotage Catherine in the most brutal and inhumane ways. There are passages in her diaries that so rawly contrast human cruelty against selfless generosity that I cannot read them without crying. Many women have stories like this, not just of mistreatment but of determination to stay their course even when their own safety is on the line. These are the stories that compel me; I collect them and integrate them into the library of my subconscious.

Such narratives are one ingredient in this body of work. There is also a dialog with material–collected natural matter, eggshells from my own chickens, wire, wax and paper. Cloth, which is a deeply familiar material to me as a former weaver and someone from a long line of makers. The narratives I collect and the materials I use are in a dance with personal experiences that I am working through - as an aging woman in a culture that does not hold much regard for aging women; as a person who believes strongly in science but also in mystical, serendipitous experience. As a witness to inhumanity and selfless generosity in real time, without the hazy filter of historical narratives.

Back to the ghost girl, who is perhaps a messenger, or a harbinger. She is timeless, a fraction of being, a fraction of experience. If we draw an outline of her in her entirety she is a mother, a daughter. A beacon who helps me stay the path.