This 20-page essay was produced to accompany the 1995 Toronto exhibitions of my Heirloom Series. This mixed media series of five related visual works explores my grandparents' life and times, and their continuing influence on my own. In the text, I describe the process of researching and making the works. As well, I place my own practice in the context of other artists' engagement with family subject, and of the rise of domestic photography through this century.

We've all faced the bore who relentlessly tells stories about people who mean nothing to us. I didn't want to be that tedious person when I was relating my own family material. My challenge was to make personal material interesting to the uninvolved. My strategy? To link my own specifics to larger trends; my series to the work of artists delving into family matters, my relatives' experiences to those of Canadian individuals and families from the turn of the century on. I found it interesting how well we all fit into our class and times. Our stories are the stuff of mainstream social history in Ontario and Quebec.

The essay begins as follows...

I stand in the ring
in the dead city
and tie on the red shoes...
They are not mine,
they are my mother's,
her mother's before,
handed down like an heirloom
but hidden like shameful letters.

-- Anne Sexton

 

If initially the child was father to the man, now (in autobiography) the man reclaims the role of being father to the child -- but this time recapturing the child for the culture by the use of the culture's theories and stories.

-- Jerome Bruner

 

August 1992: Like much of my work, the Heirloom Series was prompted by a dream, this one about my grandmother -- my mother's mother about whom I have heard many stories, but of whom I have no memory. In the dream, my grandmother stands a thin white wraith on a cross beam high above the altar of a Victorian gothic church. From my vantage point on the nave aisle, I can barely see her. She catches my eye only as she moves from one end of the beam to the other.

My grandparents are barely visible to me. I have no adult understanding of them as individuals, if I know them at all. And I have only a limited idea of how their lives, their choices, their passions continue to influence me, whether in the form of attitudes and beliefs shared by family members or via unconscious connections.

My dream and reflection upon it motivate me to bring my grandparents down to earth, to build a person experience of them. I undertake to excavate back through layers of time, to learn how the past co-exists with the present and how these people live on in me. What is their legacy? What are my heirlooms?

As an artist, I resolve to make my investigations in visual form.

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