 |
Lesley Patterson-Marx Artist’s Statement (2001 cont.) {back} I have seen the evidence, the cryptic struggle of other busy hands whose fingers are now still, whose stories are only evident in unreadable traces. The stories of their former owners are silent, told only by creases in paper, by stains, by faded spots, by foxing, by broken string, by rust, by torn edges. They carry my stories in their still bodies. I must save the saturnine, the mundane, the languid. If I am still, if I do nothing, these days will be covered, these days whose changes are imperceptible and insignificant. I will not allow them to be devoured. The mundane will be remembered, the events of little consequence will be revered. I will record these days, file them, stack each one, hour over hour, I will wrap them tightly in strong waxed thread that will keep the vines from crawling through. My hands must continue to collect and record. My hands must remain busy or I will lose count. I will lose my memory. (2005) I search for photographs of unknown people, lots of faded pictures from long ago. I look at antique stores, the flea market, yard sales, and estate sales. My Grandma Ginny had a small collection of photographs of people that she did not know(later she lost her memory and did not know the people in the photographs of her own family). I understood her compulsion to save them, even before I began collecting them myself. It is better to save these pictures from countless years of floating from hand to hand, risking the final discarding or disintegration. Grandma and I considered ourselves lucky to have them. These were someone else’s memories that we had a hold of. We didn’t know the specifics of those memories, but we could imagine them. I inherited my Grandma Ginny’s little collection of photographs after she passed away, along with many photographs of my own family. My family’s photos have specific memories attached, a tangible history for us to whom they belong. They are bound up in albums and protected. But the photographs of the unknown and the forgotten float around from county to county, state to state, and beyond. They become everyone who ever was, little fragments caught in the ether, tiny, unknowable drops in an infinite sea of time. They are part of our human history where specific events, times, and places do not matter. Ours is a common history of birth and death, familiarity and isolation, love and loss, sadness and joy. We are all part of the history of the Earth, a continuing cycle of plants, animals, and humans, passing through the stages of birth, death, and regeneration. As a ritual of connectedness, as a gesture of regeneration, I began to draw upon these photographs. {next} |
 |