Love Letters

Monoprint on paper, 2017, 13 × 16 in

I made Love Letters in 2017, pressing my mother's letter home to Taiwan - written not long after moving to America - into paper alongside two drawn figures: myself, blowing out candles, and my mother beside me. Both figures derive from the same photograph that informed a pair of oil paintings I made at art school, and that continues to inform the watercolour series I am developing now. One photograph, worked across three processes, over nine years. The repetition was not planned. What resurfaces isn't quite the photograph itself. It functions, for me, closer to memory than document. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, names this a photograph's punctum: not the image, but what the image makes present.

Unlike the photograph, which I keep reworking, the monoprint permits no such return: the plate yields a single impression and cannot be repeated. The mark and the moment are inseparable. On that impression, two distinct registers of presence coexist: her handwriting, a direct index of her hand, and my drawing of her, rendered from the photograph I keep returning to. One mark is hers. The other is mine, made in her likeness. This work holds both. Barthes writes, of a photograph of his own mother, that an image can insist this was - that something existed, once, entirely. My mother’s handwriting does that more plainly than any likeness could. It isn't a picture of her. It is a record of her hand.

This letter reached me as an adult - one of several objects bearing my mother's hand that have found their way back to me over the years, from people who kept what she left behind longer than I did. Louise Bourgeois described the studio as a site where unresolved material surfaces on its own, without the artist deciding in advance what it is. That has proven true beyond the studio as well: these objects continue to arrive on their own schedule, and each time, I find myself working with whatever comes.