My grandfather was the sole surviving child out of 12 or 13 children. They all died in childhood. He was smuggled out of his village in Ukraine around 1910.

Necklace Sketches:

A tribute to my great-grandmother—each bead a lost child. The neural network a necklace of sorts, holding the memories.

The Bundle: Holding On

(These were created in October, 2021, 5 months before the war.)

The prompt for our project was “The body as a vessel for what we are holding.”

I picked up my soft red-orange blanket, scrunched it up into a large ball and held it in my lap in front of a mirror. With one hand I grasped the blanket; with the other I awkwardly held my IPhone so I could take photos.

As I photographed, it became one of those crossover moments, in which the bundle I was carrying was no longer a blanket snatched from my bed, but a cloth my great-grandmother dragged out of the house over a century ago in Ukraine to wrap her one remaining baby in and to hold on tight. I was—for a second—my great-grandmother.

What was going to be a painting became a series of altered Photoshop images of hands clutching the folds of the cloth, the body becoming one with the bundle. Later, some of the photo-collages seemed to resemble two dancers, the one holding onto the other for dear life.