Learning to garden in the cemetery
I spent much of my childhood carrying trays of plants and flowers from the local nursery to Mount Calvary Cemetery and planting graves with my mother. I learned how to dig a hole to the proper depth, how to fill it with water and loosen the roots, and which flowers went well together and tolerate drought. I collected water in an empty Coke bottle from the tap off to the side of the road to give the flowers one last drink before we drove off. We would visit my grandparents and then move down the row to their neighbors, distant “cousins,” and then friends who had passed, all unknown to me.
Our family had owned a nursery just down the street but lost it in a legal battle after my grandfather died just one month before I was born. It may have become my calling had we kept it. My family is from Ireland. They had all worked in nurseries, farms, or factories before coming over here and then sought this work when they arrived in the US. For the past few years, I’ve been using found and altered stencils from these professions, and from the home as the ultimate symbol of immigration, to explore my family background and relationships. The mark making of the stencil forms a kind of language for me and creates what I consider to be conversations on the canvas or page. I purposely choose fast-drying media such as wax, spray paint, or water-based media with the stencils so I can replicate the pace of a conversation. At times, using this mark-making with the stencils made it feel like I was in a game of Telephone with my ancestors - each passing a bit of information down to me, symbolically or even genetically, but ending up with a different message and story at the end of the process. It was as if they were passing down information, and with each use of a stencil or tracing of it, a different story would emerge. In this way, I felt like I was exploring the epigenetics of my own lineage, the factors beyond the genetic code, and wondering about the fact I inherited a genetic connective tissue disease.
In this recent body of work, I’ve returned to the nursery tray stencils and added the die-cut image of a bakery box as a new symbol from a stencil. I have fond memories of being at the bakery and receiving a treat wrapped up in a little white box with a red and white string; sometimes, I even received these treats after visiting the cemetery. In this work, I am exploring the sense of loss and grief that comes from losing your mother or losing a child. My own mom was dealing with the loss of her father just a month before I was born, and I was dealing with hers right before my own son was born. A few years later, I would lose my identical triplet daughters. Perhaps, it is the 18-year mark of her loss and my own child growing up and nearing adulthood at the same time, that brought this new wave of work. These cycles of life and death, ever-present on a farm or in a nursery, resonate in this current moment. I imagine the conversation that could’ve happened between the generations through these marks and layers.