"Every family has its ups and downs."
-Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Lion in Winter
When I was growing up, we had no pictures on the wall, no artwork of any kind in the house, except for a collection of German figurines that had probably been wedding gifts. There were some Hummel children, but the ones that fired my imagination were lithe nude idealized women in classic poses - drinking from a stream, running with wolfhounds, feeding flowers to deer. As a very small child, I would listen to my father tell stories about them; according to him, they all depicted my mother. This made perfect sense to me; my mother was, to me, a beautiful, removed goddess. Even today, I never see these figures without thinking first of her. It moves me to imagine other figures, of other family members.
Inspiration
stemming from the acquisition of some old birdcages led me to create these
dioramas of three generations in my family.
Within them, I try to meld the stories that I was given in my childhood, the
troubled realities that I am still
unearthing from layers of secrecy, and the interpretations, right or wrong, that
my own mind and emotions seek to bend them to. Clay newspaper with period
stories enlarge the themes and show them to be, ultimately, merely useful for
the collection of excrement, waiting to be discarded. Like a dramatist who finds
his stories interpreted both by actors, director, and ultimately each audience
member, I expect these tableaus of mine to get filtered differently through each
viewer's own experiences. I want them to multiply into hundreds of different
stories, so that, even within their specificity, they ultimately become an
archetype, a myth. That is when the cage doors will truly open, and the memories
become clean.
