a kind of truth—

“…these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my interior life. Which is why the images that float around them--the remains, so to speak, at the archeological site--surface first, and they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.”

During my artist residency with the Delaware Contemporary Museum, I returned to an essay foundational to my artistic practice, The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison.

The yearning, the longing for discovery in the anterior to know life before mine, moves me to examine my interior, the richness of my own life. A reminder that the archive is not an ocular experience but a way to place life on top of another and another– to deeply know your own blood. My excitement to greet the archive and dream with the women with whom I share blood is a longing to know myself.

These women a guide to dreaming. A reminder that I am, indeed, living. That I need to sit and laugh and eat and love and move and hold and high and kiss and walk and drive and dress and move and work and rest– to pay attention to the right, the left, what’s above and the ground beneath my feet.

A reminder that I am alive, to be alive, to stay alive.