Installations

In January 2018, I was with my mother when she was diagnosed with cancer for a 3rd time. I was on break from an MFA program 2,000 miles away. We discussed it and she told me to go back to school despite her illness. The next day, I left her and my father at the hospital and flew back to California to continue my degree.

At the time I had a grueling academic schedule, more side jobs than I can remember, and a 3 hour daily train/bike commute. My mother and I are close and talk most days, but she lost her voice early on in the radiation treatments. For many weeks her voice was suddenly absent from my life. Grief only came in the evening hours of my long train rides home. In my exhaustion, I decided to visualize her as her favorite bird, the common loon. I would stare out the window and imagine she was out there flying beside the moving train.

The magical-realism helped me accept that she and I could no longer communicate, while reassuring me that she was with me and still alive. It also gave me something to draw so I could avoid crying in public. The concept for Flight Between came from the hardest nights, after a family member would call with grim news or spill their own anguish. On nights when I wasn’t sure she would survive, I imagined her as the loon flying between the planes of life and death. I tried to imagine what that place looked like. What is the landscape of the in-between? I would sketch it out — soothed by the visualization.

In whatever time I could find, I began working on the bits and pieces of the imagined in-between. I made paper floaty forms. I cut up recycled mylar in long strips for veils or trees or rain. I drew and cut a larger than life paper loon. My mother was in recovery by the time the installation came together.