Eleven Months (Touching the World)
How does one memorialize the loss of a beloved? Following the passing of my mother in 2022 I took it upon myself to experience the world for her every day for eleven months (the suggested mourning period for a parent in Judaism).
The traditional modes of permanent stones or statues didn't feel like her. Not alive enough, too heavy. I felt moved to immeditately and urgently create and document a practice for her (and for me). A grief walk.
My hand, that looks like her hand, feeling the ground, the plants through every season, the hair of her sleeping grandchildren, the most visceral small and profound moments of being alive. She was thought of in each of these pauses 335 days in a row. My obscured face only appears a couple times so that a kindred mourner may feel it possible to insert themselves into their own durational remembrance too.
The accumulated photographs, all iPhone snaps taken by me are one complete work, a new portable monument to a life in absence and a self-portrait of a life in presence.
The first printing of this book with Edition One Books and designed by Ruxanda Vihrest, was 200 copies in September 2023. Remaining limited copies can be purchased from the Praise Shadows Art Shop. There will be a second printing in 2025.
A fragment of the John O'Donohue Poem I recited in my eulogy to my mother, February 2022:
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Besides us when beauty brightens
