working title: Engravings
These photographs are observations, detailing traces of existence living alongside someone I love. My house was built in 1940 at the foot of the Catskill mountains. It has always felt connected to a gentler and more expansive reality, beyond its material and small structure, found within its three simple rooms. Since moving in, the house has always felt that it required little, and I could be happy with a light, a bed, and my husband to share it with. My husband recently retired as a nurse. When we began dating, he had just started his career at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in NYC, working the night shift on the AIDS floor, which he chose because so many young men were dying. After thirty years of work, he says the bookends of his career are AIDS and Covid. His retirement is a reminder to us of how much time has passed and the cycles of offering and receiving that have taken place over several decades. My mother passed away 5 years ago. Recently I’ve been spending time with her best friend. She is now 89, the age my mother was when she died. This relationship naturally came to be, on account of my mother’s absence. Throughout the day, making the bed or serving tea, I reflect could this be the last time I will do this. In this way, I take the bread, I put the bread on the plate, I place the plate on the table, experiencing the distinctness of these moments and the impressions left behind. It’s a pensive lament realized through countless small steps from one room to another.