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).
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.
The accumulated photographs, all iPhone snaps taken by me are one complete work, a new monument to a life in absence and a self-portrait of a life in presence. Dimensions variable.
A fragment of the John O'Donohue Poem I recited in my eulogy to her
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
