“Memory…It brings us joys faint as the perfume of flowers, faded and dried… 

                                                                                                                            Author: Henry Ward Beecher

For my project, “Forget Me Not”, I explore memory and loss using family photographs, my mother’s passion for embroidery, fabric, pins and thread. 

Before losing her eyesight and memory, my mother was passionate about embroidering.  She was especially gifted at crewel embroidery of flowers.  Flowers represent beauty; they elicit and symbolize different emotions and are used as gifts to convey feelings of love, happiness, joy, loss and sorrow. Used to honor and remember the dead, they are not forever and fade no matter how much nurturing we provide. 

As a tribute to my mother, I create images on silk organza using photographs I made of her embroidered pieces.  I selectively stitch on the silk overlays in low light, and unlike my mother, I allow the thread to knot, twist or come undone, reinforcing my mother’s decline mentally and physically and her fading relationship to the underlying photograph.  I then float the newly embroidered pieces over photographs of those she loved but no longer remembered.  Stitching helps bind me to my mother and her past as I incorporate my own needlework onto the images of her embroidery, the flowers represent different emotions or states of being linked to the photographs, the silk overlays reinforce the effect of a “veiled” recollection and obscured vision; loose, tangled threads and unfinished fabric remind me of the unraveling of memory, the chaos of dementia and how life and death are intertwined and complicated.

The process is cathartic and helps me to accept the looming legacy of forgotten moments, my own possible dementia and mortality.