In May 2022, we buried my mother on a bed of compost she and I created together. Surrounded by the mycorrhizae she loved, my mother was now in the care of others and I was free from my 56 year responsibility to make her happy. Since birth, my job had been to bring joy and distraction after my brother Paul, whom I never knew, died of ‘crib death.’ Over the decades, this expectation wore me down.
After my mother died, I kept her spirit, and the spirits of other women in my life at arms length, creating still lives with their belongings. Over time those belongings beckoned. Still, In Motion is my first foray into self-portraiture. Playing dress-up with vintage clothes belonging to women I’ve loved and lost and working with props, like childhood photographs, an old cigarette and a vintage frame, I danced to the other side of grief, emerging in a grove of trees I created during my mother’s final year.
These ritualistic ‘performances’ were a wondrous three-way conversation with my camera, the objects at hand and my grief. Along the way, I processed Mummy and me. She loved to walk alone in the woods, something that made me afraid; I loved to dance, something that made her self-conscious. Mummy read about ‘gutsy gals;’ I wanted to be one. Through it all, we are still, in motion. She’s becoming one with the soil; I’m becoming me.