I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. After meeting my wife, we quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, there are a number of shared names across both families.
What quickly became apparent to me were the links between my wife’s mother and my maternal grandmother. Both lives ended tragically young. Both died from genetically passed diseases. Apart from photographs and memories shared by those who knew them, I would never know them.
How do you create an image of someone who died a quarter of a century ago, a person you have never known? By searching for visual pleasures in the world around me, I make visual the abstract histories known to me about Joan, my mother-in-law, and Jean, my maternal grandmother. Through examinations of heredity and meditation on coincidence and predetermination, I cling to what will inevitably be lost, trying to view grief not as something that passes, but something we are always in the midst of.
