Art Statement

Georgia Holmer

PHOTOS: Mother, Daughter, Wife, Bilious Rosary

SCULPTURE: Exhumed

My mother passed away in 1998, after a horrific and extended battle with cancer that decimated her body and our family. She was only 54, the age I am now, and my grief at her passing at the time was complicated and incompleteIn 2020, as I was sorting boxes in the aftermath of my divorce, I found many bits of her that had been packed away for decades. Her schoolgirl notebooks with impeccable handwriting, her research from her never completed PhD, letters, photos of her as a girl and young woman, a desiccated lipstick, and shockingly, a long, still glossy, swathe of her chestnut brown hair. I remembered when she had shorn it shortly after my sister was born, and how she wore it boyishly short until there was none. To cope with the flood of grief I experienced, I used the tools I had as a writer and artist. I made a series of small sculptures using clay and paper mâché, collages with some of her own documents and copious amounts of brown string the same color as her hair. This “reliquary” as I called it explored my ambivalence, my resentment, and my pain; the creative process – including photographing these artefacts – helped me deepen my own understanding of her as a woman and a mother. What I was also exploring through this process were my own feelings of indignity tied to sickness and dying and to cremation. My need to create a work that involved burning and fire, ritualistically re-forge my mother, and render her intact, upright, and beautiful after all that had happened to her body and in her life became a compulsion that drove the development of the final sculpture.