Daisy Patton

Artist Statement for “Forgetting is so long”

“What rituals are useful to locating someone who’s gone. Our story has no language. My loss always in communication with your loss.”

—Ella Longpre, How to Keep You Alive

Who do we choose to remember, and how? This fraught terrain encompasses family relationships, identities, and collective memorialization. For some, living memory can lengthen the presence of loved ones in our lives; we only succumb to a blank past when our histories are no longer recalled and held by those that once cared for us. The family photograph is a vessel for retrieving memory, but as time accumulates, these emotionally laden images become unknowable, missing their necessary translators.

Our ancestors’ lives are encoded into ourselves through complex interconnections, whether through epigenetics or other practices preserved through time. The inherent loss embedded in these discarded photographs is intertwined with the fragility of the body itself. The depicted bodies can both reveal and conceal embodied language, personality and cultural markers, as well as emotional and physical well-being. These ties to corporeality and lineages hold us in ways that can manifest widely—as a tender embrace, or even a suffocation.

In Forgetting is so long, I collect abandoned family photographs, enlarge them to life-size, and paint over them as a kind of re-enlivening, dislocating the individuals from their formerly static place and time. Family photographs are revered to their loved ones, but if unmoored, the images and people within become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing sacred objects forces a “shock into being”—suddenly, we perceive them as present and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I seek to lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance.

The use of bright swathes of color and ornate patterns signify a kind of vibrant afterlife, and the people’s vestiges become visitations. Each piece functions as an altar for the departed, a portal that fractures linear time, and a possibility for rich connection between the viewer and the painted subjects. Floral vegetation, forever blooming in fragmented time, underline relationships to the natural world and the hereafter. These rewilded botanic patterns adorn and embellish the photographic relics with devotional marks of care. Nearly forgotten people are transfigured and "reborn" into a fantastical, liminal space that holds both beauty and joy, temporarily suspended from oblivion.