Our Spirit Life: Meditations on Ancestry through Art & Text

By Mr Stephen Mead

These photomontages and the text accompanying them had a long hibernation period. My mom passed away in January 2000, and then in 2012 in the same month, from the same hospital, my father passed away. Both times boxes of family photos came into my possession. Over the years, I'd written poems and done tribute pieces of art for my parents, but I'd been intending to do something with these inherited photos in particular. Going through them again as I prepared a slideshow for dad's Wake lines of a Laurie Anderson song kept coming to mind: "when my father died it was like a whole library burned to the ground." Indeed, knowing how much of my insular upbringing has vanished I created these montages as a memento mori for the life which was, yet also as an acknowledgement of how much it is encapsulated as a living story within me. The is part of these montages comes both from sky footage I took and used both for Dad's film and as 'stills' to mix with images from the past, as well as my own photos of the rural surroundings our lives shared. In an email I tried to explain the impetus for this series to my sister: "I'd like to write about our family history, not like some sort of indictment, tell-all, Mommy Dearest, but more as a sort of poetic exploration of ordinary lives where so much is shrouded in history, in obscurity, but like the lives of everyone ever not written about, still deserving of some sort of commemoration/tribute for having made it through this "mortal coil", good times and bad. My sister wrote back, "Go for it!" which was certainly a big boon. As the end of my family line, with heaps of unread writings and unseen art under my name, consider this book as a cave drawing for an evanescent legacy, yet one where love in the bloodline still flowed steady.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1492266205
• ISBN13: 9781492266204
• Release Date: January 2014
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.3" x 8.3"