Memento of Mortality
Memento of Mortality
My grandmother Perkins had a small room filled with porcelain dolls. It was a little room that opened off the side of the front of the house, almost like a tea or reading room. Light came through a large, half-oval-shaped window, softened by baby-blue lace curtains.
The dolls sat quietly in their places, dressed mostly in Victorian dresses and carefully preserved. Each one held the strange stillness of something made to resemble a living person. Some had glass eyes. All of them had names.
There was a family joke about my grandmother. She would say she was going to go out there, sit with a cup of coffee, and talk to her dolls. Someone in the family would inevitably say, “As long as they don't talk back to Mom.”
I say, I think they always did.
That room stayed with me.
It is a place where I often take pleasure in visualizing my memories.
Years later, I was sitting on my couch in Philadelphia with a neck injury and beginning to feel depressed. I could no longer work on the artworks that had been in progress before I was injured. At the time, I had been working on a series of three-dimensional figures. When I could no longer physically continue that work, I pulled out every sketchbook I had and picked up a pen.
I found myself wanting to make a figure—a sculpture, a figurine—of every person I could think of.
So I began drawing.
I decided to draw, gesturally, every personality I could remember.
I did not want to make figures of family and friends. Those relationships carried too much emotional weight. I knew something about their souls. Instead, I reached into popular culture, history, music, movies, television, and toys—images and personalities that had entered my imagination throughout my life.
They were, in a sense, soulless shadows of my past.
I needed to create their souls.
The life we give to figurines is part of what interests me as an artist.
An action figure, a Barbie doll, a porcelain figurine, a carved wooden figure, or a small sculpture can begin as an object manufactured or made by someone else. But once we place it in our home, our collection, our artwork, or our memory, it begins to take on another life.
We give these objects identities.
We give them stories.
We give them personalities, histories, heroes, villains, families, fears, desires, and sometimes even memories that belong more to us than to the objects themselves.
I never spoke to these people.
They never knew me.
Yet they occupied some small space within my memory. They became part of the landscape of my life.
I would think of someone, make a quick drawing from memory, write down who they were, and move on to the next.
I wasn't trying to create accurate portraits. I was trying to capture what remained—the gesture, posture, attitude, silhouette, or presence of a person as they existed in my memory.
Eventually, there were hundreds of drawings.
When my partner and I moved to North Little Rock, Arkansas, and I got my studio up and running, I returned to them. I cut the figures from the paper, glued them onto cardboard, and cut them out again.
The drawings became objects.
The objects became figures.
And the figures became a collection of memories.
I see a connection between these figures and the porcelain dolls in my grandmother's little room.
Both are attempts to hold onto something that cannot actually be held.
A likeness can be preserved, but a life cannot.
A figure can remain standing long after the person it represents is gone.
Memento means a reminder—a physical object that causes us to remember.
For me, these figures are mementos of people I never knew, but who nevertheless became part of my life through memory and imagination.
They are not portraits of relationships.
They are portraits of remembrance.
I think about mortality through the act of making them. Every figure is a small refusal to let a memory completely disappear. At the same time, every figure reminds me that preservation is impossible.
The person is not there.
Only the image remains.
Perhaps that is what my grandmother's porcelain dolls taught me before I had the words for it.
A room can be filled with figures and still be filled with absence.
We make things to remember.
We make figures because people disappear.
We make mementos because we know we will too.
Through this process, I began to understand that I wasn't simply making a collection of characters. I was excavating my own memory. I was reaching backward through movies, music, television, history, toys, and popular culture and pulling out the people who had somehow marked the passage of my life.
I couldn't go back and recover the years themselves.
So I grabbed the people.
This is the primary location of the William F. Laman Public Library.
