Golden Girls

A Meditation on Transience, Memory, Storytelling and Legacy

 The Golden Girls began while a family patriarch was in his last days. Far away, in my darkened studio, I sculpted light over bits of garden ephemera laid atop handmade papers. My process requires prolonged periods of studying the most minor details of form and shadow. And while I found imagined stories of grace and loss in my fading and frail botanical structures, the very real process of the long goodbye happening two thousand miles away weighed heavy on my mind. As I painted light into my “digital canvas,” the aesthetic process of deciding what to reveal and what to mute reverberated deep in my heart. How will our stories and memories become part of the future’s fabric? Who will hold our stories in their hearts?

When I printed the Golden Girls on fine art paper, I felt part of the story was missing. The liminal quality of transience, of something here and not here, was lost in a flat presentation. So, I embarked on a quest to create prints on glass that invite the viewer to take a deeper look, literally and figuratively. Using an emulsion-based photo transfer technique, I placed the image on the back of an acrylic or glass plate to create more depth. Every print comes out differently. Just like our memories, small bits are left behind. I lay the print over gilded handmade kinwashi or unryu papers that mutes the play of reflected golden light while giving it an ethereal quality. The paper fibers complement the sense of transformation, of one thing becoming another, of memories embedding in a new tapestry.

Creating these images is full of frustrations and failures, but at the same time, it is meditative and profoundly satisfying.

This series is a work in progress. The depth, texture, and luminosity of the Golden Girls are lost when compressed into a single plane by a camera. Below are the digital images, not the final physically-composited prints. The Golden Girls are best seen in person.