Gardening with My Grandmother in Echoes: Revisiting Memory
I’m excited to share that an image from my ongoing series Gardening with My Grandmother will be included in Echoes: Revisiting Memory at Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey, Michigan. The exhibition opens September 18 and runs through October 31 in the Gilbert Gallery.
Juried by photographer and Assistant Professor of Photography Paige Young, Echoes: Revisiting Memory brings together artists exploring the space between people, places, and events and the ways we remember them. Crooked Tree Arts Center Visual Arts Director Jennifer Cantley describes the exhibition as an opportunity to consider the memories that remain with us over time, sometimes as clear recollections and sometimes simply as feelings.
That idea is at the heart of Gardening with My Grandmother.
My grandmother’s garden had always extended beyond her own yard. She shared flowers and plants with friends, neighbors, and her community, creating connections that continued to bloom in other people’s gardens. After my grandmother passed away, her North Dakota garden disappeared beneath years of weeds. When my grandfather passed and I had a garden of my own, my mother and I returned to dig up what remained.
We dug unknown roots and bulbs from the overgrown earth that remembered my grandmother’s garden. We drove them eight hours to Minnesota over several trips, planted them, and waited.
During that time, I discovered an album my grandmother had made documenting the garden she loved in sometimes blurry and out-of-focus images, lovingly archived in a photo album kept in her nightstand. Pairing her photographs with her flowers that continue to bloom today, this ongoing series explores legacy, memory, and our connection through time and place each time the garden blooms.
In extending her garden to Minnesota, my mother and I became part of that same tradition of sharing plants, carrying the relationships and memories attached to them from one place and generation to another.
The photograph selected for Echoes: Revisiting Memory, The Light Between Us, pairs my grandmother’s photograph of her garden with black-eyed Susans growing from the plants we brought home to Minnesota. Her photograph preserves the garden as she saw it then; the flowers growing around it are part of the garden as it exists now. The image brings those two moments together—her garden and mine, North Dakota and Minnesota, her photograph and my own.
I love that this piece will be part of an exhibition asking what remains of the people and places that stay with us. For me, sometimes what remains isn't only a memory. Sometimes it takes root.
Echoes: Revisiting Memory features work by 30 artists and is on view:
September 18–October 31
461 East Mitchell Street, Petoskey, Michigan.
Admission is free. A free public opening reception will be held Friday, September 18, from 5:30–7:00 p.m.