Mom-i

(Work in progress)

We called my mother’s mother Mom-i. Family lore says my older sister named our grandfather “Pop-i” when she learned to speak, and “Mom-i” naturally followed. Mom-i passed away when I was a teenager, and much of what I know of her comes from childhood memories and my mother’s stories. Memories are notoriously unreliable, and our present selves greatly influence how we recall the past. Who was she, really? Can I hope to know her impartially?

So much of her is threaded through me. My Mom-i passed down to my mother and me her stubbornness, her independence, her light eyes, her dainty hands and her skill for sewing. A lingering sensation of not belonging — a motif woven through my own life — seems to have been woven through theirs as well.

With help from three generations of women in my family — my mother, sister and nieces — I re-created scenes from my childhood, which I then photographed. They included Thanksgiving dinner at Mom-i’s house, Mom-i in her living room and Mom-i at her sewing table. Mom-i was a prolific quilter; my mother, a prolific quilt starter. I used my mother’s unfinished quilt squares and the costumes I used in this project to make my own first quilt … still unfinished.

As I have since I was a child, I took my camera into nature to make sense of things. I chose to set these re-creations among Northern California’s redwood trees because they have long been a haven for me. They also echo the project’s theme. The trees pass an incredible amount of information to their seedlings under the soil — some which we understand and some which remain a mystery.