LAURA FINDLAY — BITTER DISH
ESSAY AND ART Laura Findlay
My mother gave me my life and then left it not long after. Most of her family was dead before I even arrived in the world. It was from her that I inherited my nearsightedness, flat feet, questionable BRCA genes, and a complicated relationship with deceased family.
Her absence was my most prominent feature growing up. It outshone even the wildest of self-inflicted haircuts. A moody unsupervised child raises questions; people could tell something was missing. I learned to recognize the series of emotions that friends’ parents, teachers and transient adults would go through when they learned that my mother was dead. A chorus of Oh’s would start from the sharp “Oh!” of realization and swing all the way down to the somber “Ohhhhmmmhmm”, seeing my dirty clothes and second-hand glasses in a new light. By twelve I had answered the question “where is your mother” a thousand times. I would answer it another ten thousand times more. Sometimes my answers would be curt. If I was in a good mood they were dismissive. On temperamental days I could use the answer as a barb to sting back whoever was making me retell my history one too many times that week. In his grief my father turned to Teflon, hardened, dark, quiet and evasive. From the time of my mother's cancer diagnosis, he became an absent shadow that didn’t reemerge for a decade. After her death he brought us as far west as we could get from her grave. Ten years, nine moves, five evictions, and a string of extraordinarily bad decisions finally forced a corporeal version of him to reappear in a blue Walmart vest on a coarse pull-out couch. By that point he had compressed his sadness into the deep recesses of his mind. He avoided broaching the subject of why we were there for almost twenty years. My father, master subject-changer, maintains his skilled performance of a smile, cough and intonation of his voice to dodge even the most direct of inquiries. His evasive nature has resulted in my distinct desire for candor.
He wasn’t the only one to change the subject when I asked questions about my mother’s death. Nearly thirty years later, he's the only reliable witness left. Pulling truth from a person isn’t like accessing an archive, it needs to be carefully coaxed. The spark of a story needs to be fanned with patience and precision. The risk of collapse is part of the thrill of inquiry. With someone so practiced with evasion, the conversation can turn irreparably and entirely to the subject of the weather without a moment’s notice. When I was old enough to ask for the stories I didn’t know I never heard, I encountered the disjointed narratives of selective memory. When pressed, the information I could pluck from my father, brother, and my mother’s friends would change. Every narrative was distinct and sometimes conflicting.
My grief didn’t start with her death, it started two years earlier with her cancer diagnosis, around the time that memory begins. There wasn’t one big moment of revelation about her illness, no clear and hard and sad conversation. Instead, the information trickled its way to me in the form of long absences, through sunken eyes, worried tears, and a bald head hidden beneath a brown acrylic wig. As though I couldn’t be trusted to swallow it whole without choking, I was meant to taste the bitter dish one spoonful at a time.
Silence fossilizes grief. Preserved, it becomes perfect, hard and festering. It’s impossible to arrest sadness after a parent dies, regardless of how much information is hidden. Instead of a knot that gradually comes untied, it cinches, twists and winds its way around other unexpected parts. Euphemisms and similes become thick like coats of paint designed to protect but ultimately used to conceal. It is the slowest way to choke on carefully parsed bad news.
When I was a child, funerals were a regular occurrence. I’d attended a dozen before I was ever a guest at a wedding. The change in attire was welcome. There came a point, around the age of 30, that the number of people older than me was dwindling. Suddenly my friends and peers were doing the dying. Cancer, fentanyl, drunk drivers, and drowning were the culprits of this new cycle. Without realizing it I transitioned from witnessing death in the future to being exposed and vulnerable in the present.
« Silence fossilizes grief. Preserved, it becomes perfect, hard and festering. »
I have walked around my entire life terrified of forgetting people. Each person gone is one great pulse of sadness that can rebound again and again. Fear, however, doesn’t just dim into sadness, it turns into anger. The kind that’s primal, childish and directionless. The world doesn’t offer many spaces to let it leak out. So I picked up a camera because it was already too late and they were already gone. I used what was at my disposal to bring them back in any shape I could. The camera felt like the best weapon I had to fight the erosion of memories and objects. I dressed up as the people I had lost, wearing orphaned wigs, scarves, brooches and jackets with scents long since faded. I staged their objects in tableaux, interviewed strangers about their loss and borrowed from other’s nostalgia and family history. For the first time art school provided a scaffolding of legitimacy to the curiosity that my grief provoked. I used these works and private acts to frequently travel back through time. When I did, I worried that the past would be contaminated with who I was in the present. The camera felt like the most objective way to collect the parts of people I felt leaving me.
I am an artist now. I spend my days indirectly talking about the empty spaces left by people who are gone. My earliest paintings began by using other people as a proxy for the forgotten and fractured archive of my early life. Over the years the figures grew smaller and smaller until one day they disappeared entirely and what emerged in their place were dark landscapes, filled with solitary waves and isolated mountains, lone bats and spiders.
Grief doesn’t just disappear; it simply and elegantly transforms. It becomes energy, the kind that needs to be spent, or else it might consume you whole when you’re not paying attention. There is the kind of grief that comes from loss, from the sharp fissure formed when a person is permanently removed from your world. The grief of absence is distinct from loss, quietly making itself known in ten thousand tiny ways over many years. They combine to create the bitter dish that’s taken daily, not to clean the plate but to develop a resilience to something that contaminates as it nourishes.
— Laura Findlay
« Grief doesn’t just disappear; it simply and elegantly transforms. It becomes energy, the kind that needs to be spent, or else it might consume you whole when you’re not paying attention. »
Galerie Division presented Tuff, an exhibition by Laura Findlay, in Montréal and Toronto in 2019.