a return to source.
“So, for me, there is a way in which the feeling of images is both in your hands and in your heart.”
While I have since returned home, I started writing this post at the edge of the lake behind my great aunt’s home in Portsmouth, Virginia. Six years ago, in that same place, during our annual trip, I discovered an immense family archive. Inside its pages were faces I had never seen before, dated back to the early 20th century of great-great-grandmothers and fathers, uncles and aunts of the past.
Tucked inside the well-kept albums, I found a photograph of my grandmother, Annetta, and her youngest sister, Irene, dated August 1967. It was a memory captured by my uncle as he and my great-aunt traveled to Canada from Virginia, stopping in my hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, along the way. Nearing 30 at the time, I remember the encounter with the image, the two of them, twenty-somethings, legs crossed, hands clasped at their knees, heads thrown back in laughter. What an experience to peer into the eyes of the two, a half-century before my fingers found the delicate edges of the polaroid.
At that moment, their interior lives stretched from an inquiry into a significant concern, an obsession even. I was curious about their dreams, desires, fears, and everything I did not understand about the women I had watched for my entire life. Had they wondered, wandered, dreamed, imagined, screamed, and cried at the frustrations of their lives? I needed to know if they sat on the edge of their beds, head hung in despair, unsure of themselves– unable to make sense of the present. If in their hands they held a past and future and if their minds grasped a half-remembered dream.
The return home prompted a proper investigation when I attempted to write a small collection of poetry entitled The Anterior, which started with a few words that emblazoned my heart for weeks,
“May the women with whom I share blood speak my name and never find themselves alone.”
Only a few eyes have seen the work that, at the time, could not quite express the magnitude of the obsession, where the desire for deafening sound, vibrant color, rich texture, and lush image lived above the realm of the black ink and its white page. I was a woman starving for new art. In an attempt to satiate the hunger, I journeyed into collage, comforted by the craft and the discovery that when spirit and creativity collide, we are offered a higher path of expression, a more profound realization of ourselves, and a practice that liberates.
As my work evolves, I think about this moment, this image, and an obsession that opened a portal to the magic of new art, ideas, and a way of seeing and being. It was the beginning of my relationship with interiority and memory, and even more so, an entryway into my understanding; by holding the women with whom I shared blood, I ultimately took pleasure in holding myself. That day, an encounter with the archive day changed everything.
It is my desire to allow the archive to appear and reemerge as a gift every day. It is a place to travel a memory, reckon with grief, hold conversations with the past, reimagine the present, and contemplate the future. It is where your skin begins and ends between cardboard pages, opening and closing behind the plastic to fall apart and become new again in a moment that does not remember you.
Greet the archive with excitement and dream with those in the anterior, with whom you share blood and find your body. Can you feel the crescendo? Follow the soft hum in your hands, the low light behind your eyes, its gentle touch, and faint smell until you rememory it all and are carried back to yourself.
