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CARTOGRAPHERS OF MEMORY

I was raised on stories I didn’t believe, but wanted to. Fairy tales and family histories that changed with every retelling. Through empty roads and conversations around kitchen tables, I learned that every moment is both a discovery and a loss. The facts of our lives become history until we have only memory and personal mythology.

My grandmother, Tutu, had a stroke in February 2015, at the age of 92. Four months later she told me that she could no longer laugh or cry, but that she still had a universe of thoughts inside her mind. For this woman of passion and chaos, a house was never enough space for all of her paper sculptures, her pianos and violins, her inventions and ideas. Now she sits in a chair in her daughter’s house, surrounded by beige walls, her mind filled with emotions and desires she struggles to express.

When I was a child her life existed for me as a series of unbelievable tales. Training as a concert violinist in New York and drawing maps during WWII. Building a house in southern California out of barn doors and stained glass windows. Intentionally burning toast every morning. Befriending movie stars and opera singers and getting married four times to three husbands, but raising five daughters on her own.

At 30 I realized the stories were true. Without knowing it, I spent years retracing many of my grandmother’s dreams–from New York City to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Adventure is her legacy.

These images, captured during my travels, are part family album, memoir, poem, and prayer. In the high desert, our masks and façades are scoured away in the wind and the dust, washed clean in the afternoon rain. The land there is made of light. It is sunbaked stone and agave plants and women emerging from their old lives like butterflies into the sharp sunlight.

This is a map of my search for my family’s history and my own home. The photographs show the expansion of a life, of becoming part of a world more vast and fantastic than the books that fed my childhood dreams. But pause and reverse, look at the images backward, and they tell the story of a life that now turns inward, contained within four walls. And the universe of her mind.

This work was created while I was the Visual Artist in Residence for the San Miguel Writers Conference. I am so grateful that I got to share the finished book with Tutu before she died. Her response was everything. "Thank you for remembering."