Mom-i

(Work in progress)

We called my mother’s mother, Mom-i. 

My Mom-i passed down to my mother and me, her stubbornness, independence, light eyes, dainty hands, and a proclivity for sewing. The lingering sensation of not belonging, a motif threading through my own life, seems to have been woven into the lives of my mother and Mom-i too. My Mom-i passed away when I was a teenager. What I know of her, stem from my childhood memories and my mother’s stories. Memories are notoriously inaccurate and our present selves have a great influence on how we recall the past. Who was Mom-i really? Can I know her impartially? What other parts of her are threaded through me?

Just like when I was a kid, I take my camera into nature when I want to make sense of things. With the collaboration from the women in my family, we recreated scenes from my childhood and I photographed them. The scenes included Thanksgiving dinner at my Mom-i’s house, my Mom-i in her living room, my Mom-i at her sewing table. I chose to place the scenes amongst the Redwood Trees because the Redwoods have been a safe haven for me. “Mother Redwood Trees” pass an incredible amount of information to their seedlings, some information that we are aware of and some that will forever lie under the surface, a mystery that seems to mirror my own musings.

This project has been a practice in empathy and a search for belonging.