In Search of Lost Time
Virgnia Woolf Was Here : Short Stories
Virgnia Woolf Was Here : Between the Acts
Virgnia Woolf Was Here : Mapping Mrs. Dalloway
Virgnia Woolf Was Here : Flush
Virgnia Woolf Was Here : Altered Books
VideoPoetry
Housekeeping
Temenos
A Very Easy Death
End of Road
Invoice
Paradox
Resuscitation
When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermmilk
Phantom Pains
Offering
Call Home Mothers Dead
Adriane Little

 



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To be deprived of parents [mother] – is this where freedom starts?  How is it that they, the others, do not know that your parents [mother] are still at your side, unseen witnesses buried in another language?    

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

 

This body of work is telling of the experiences of motherloss, cultural rupture and disassociation as a translation of a relationship to trauma.  This then offers a re-imagined space of the maternal. This is experienced as a shattering of a moment as losing something so important that one does not know who they are without it or intrarupture.  My visual work originates from the perspective of photographic processes, but also crosses media and theoretical positions.  The underpinnings of my research and visual work are an intersection of psychoanalysis and post-colonial theory through the lens of a feminist investigation.

The recent projects that I have created are embedded in these intimate spaces; however, lend themselves to a larger discussion.  These projects are investigations into the ways in which one can recover from orphanhood, both parental and cultural. This is a recovery of the moments that were never able to exist as a physically lived experience but instead have been imbedded within what I call the matrilineal ghost.  This is visualized through a deceptively simple strategy of dark beauty, a series of mediated rituals and symbols of resuscitation and continuance.  The matrilineal ghost provides a container for cultural and personal history that becomes visible as instinct.  It is a space that continues to evolve through the interrogation of traumatic moments. The matrilineal ghost is the space where the residue of history is found.  The matrilineal ghost encourages a position that the psychical and corporeal bodies are perpetual and that one supports the other partly through the uncanny.  By this I mean that they exist as the same yet divided realm of space and time.  The energy between helps the other exist; each desires the other through a language of trauma. One becomes more aware of the matrilineal ghost through the absence of the maternal body. Yet it is much more.

Call Home Mothers Dead
is both literal and metaphor. These experiences, of presence and absence or haunting, conflict and subsequent obsessiveness, are a translation of a relationship to trauma. The dandelion is used to carve an entry point into these experiences and for a symbol of persistence.  Call Home Mothers Dead is an impetus for continual renewal and the reality that beauty can grow and exist with little attention.  The video in this body of work is slowed in speed to represent the reality that one is in when experiencing a traumatic moment and for the way that trauma lives in post-memory of such an experience. Call Home Mothers Dead searches for a relationship to the matrilineal ghost. It is a void that is simultaneously overfull and almost empty.

 


 

















 
 
 
 
Adriane Little