This project started with a desire to memorialize grief, especially the grief felt in the year 2020.
It was a year filled with mourning. We suffered individually, in our families, as communities and world wide. We were isolated and confined, broken and infected, judged and criticized. We lost and we let go. Many died, others endured illness, and some lost hope. Many were harmed and some did the harming. Through all of this, we returned to something humankind is quite familiar with—the process of mourning.
I posed this question to a few family members and friends: “Who do you mourn?”. I collected their answers, many of which came from this year, but some from heartbreaks of years past. The simple stamped text of the responses and the monolithic design of the handmade paper together reference the many monuments and grave sites around the Washington D.C. area. These responses installed form a collected memorial to those mourned, and question the impermanence of many of our relationships yet the certain grief we experience when these relationships are severed.
The materials used to create these paper pieces include mundane items that I have saved over the last year such as scraps of mail, deposited checks, used paper towels, magazines, random handouts, unneeded notes, candy wrappers, no-longer-sticky painters tape, etc. Each piece is unique and substantial in thickness, yet made of materials which could have been easily trashed, wasted, or recycled. I have collected these items from my own life, and give them a new life as an offering to my fellow humans. I hope that this collaboration will help us remember the sadness and anger we felt this year, unify us, and help us rise.
