If you haven't had a moment to review the galleries before this post, I invite you to browse through the "Helga" gallery now. This blog post comes at the end of a chapter in my artistic work, when I have finally laid this project to rest....for now.
"Helga" was the body of work that was never planned for, but it has become a body of work that has consumed me for the past year. I have always been very strong when it comes to death, but it seems that this time around, grief finally caught up to me.
Almost a full year ago, on May 20th 2017, I was standing barefoot in my kitchen, steadfastly icing a birthday cake for my son's 11th birthday party that afternoon. Everything about the day was normal, except for running late to my son's own party. I had woken up, showered, spoke to my mom on the phone about my grandmother's successful morning surgery, and proceeded to grab presents and get ready for the party.
Not forty five minutes later as I am covered in icing, my husband comes into the kitchen with his phone, and hands it to me. I had left my phone in the other room so I assumed it was only my parents trying to ask me a question about the party location, but when I got the phone my father started saying something completely different.
He told me that my grandmother might be fading, that something had happened and she had already been resuscitated once, and that my mother was there at the hospital with her, all alone.
The tears started to come immediately, but it was the rock in my chest that started sinking into my stomach that made it real. The only thing I could say was "No, not today..." but there was no time. We finished our conversation quickly, and I agreed to come grab my father before we sped off to the hospital. I hung up the phone, and chaos began to ensue,
At first I think I wanted freak out, but I couldn't when I had my son and his two friends in my living room, laughing and having a great time on the couch while they waited for me to finish the cake and take them to the party. They couldn't see me in the kitchen crying at first, but my husband was there. He of course hugged me and said the words everyone is supposed to say, but my mind couldn't go there yet.
I was too awestruck in that moment, for life had presented me with the bittersweet gift of wisdom, knowledge, and sight. I was being shown one of those rare instances of life where the balance of life and death, light and dark, youth and age can be seen all at once. The dichotomy of a death on a day of birthday celebration shook me. It still does. I will never forget that day because of that. That was the message I chose to pass on to my son as I tried to explain through gentle tears that I had to go, I wouldn't be able to make it to his birthday party, that I was afraid my grandmother was dying... I told him to celebrate that day, to celebrate eleven years of life, for every day was truly a gift, and you never know what day will be your last.
From there I retreated to the bedroom, so I could sort the chaos for just one minute. I was sending my husband alone to the birthday party, and I had been the one to plan it. I was afraid everything would go wrong, and we still had to finish paying the account for the room rental... so I first pulled out my phone to check my bank account.
This was another one of those moments where you aren't sure if you're just crazy or superstitious, or if everything is just coincidence, but once I had logged into my bank account and saw my balance, I instinctually threw the phone away from me...
Then, I grabbed it back, and took a screen shot, because I knew no one would believe me.... my bank account balance at that moment was $666.50.
Some people might not believe in omens, and I don't necessarily believe the devil was involved in all of this, but I do believe in signs, in the universe speaking to us in mysterious ways. It felt even more so like an omen when I found out later my grandmother had passed at approximately 11:22AM, and I had taken the screen shot at 11:21AM. Nothing felt like coincidence to me that day. I was being shown too many things, and it was all starting to pile on top of me.
But I stayed as strong as I could. I drove to pick up my father, and then we went on to the hospital while my husband handled the birthday events.
When we got to the hospital and entered my grandmother's room, I thought she was just sleeping, stabilized under anesthesia, something like that... you know how you see a dead body and it still almost looks like its breathing... I thought she still was.
I reached out and touched her hand, and I said aloud how cold she was, and that was when my mother said she had already passed, and she had been gone for a while. My father hugged us both and we waited for doctors to come finish procedures and paperwork, and we started talking about what would happen next... But all I could think about in my own head was one thing: I didn't make it in time to say goodbye.
I kept that to myself mostly, because I wasn't sure how to grapple with it at first. I was put together pretty well when we first found out she was gone, but it was my regular practice of saving a loved one's hair that messed me up. I saved my first cat's hair in a locket, and I did the same when my grandfather died, turning his hair into a locket. So of course my mother suggested that we do the same with my grandmother's hair. The nurse found a pair of scissors, and I held a lock of my grandmother's hair while my mother cut...
The moment her hair dropped into my palm I couldn't think about anything else except that her hair in my hand looked like my own, as if it was my dead hair I was holding, and it just became too real. I lost it at that point and walked away to the window to cry out loud alone. I couldn't be alone though, my mom needed me, but I was going through something I had never conceived before. My grandmother was German, and she had platinum blonde hair all her life. The photos I have of her are from when she had dyed it brown, but all of my conscious life, my grandmother always had "blonde" hair, or what had once been blonde but had turned into a perfect snow white. I have known for years that I would be blessed in my old age with the same gorgeous white hair, that I would never be a salt and pepper woman. I will one day have gleaming white hair like I did as a toddler, like my grandmother had in her old age, and that was why my grandmother's hair suddenly meant so much to me. I was looking at my past, present, and future all in a bundle of hair strands. And I truly felt that weight. That was the weight that came over me for the next few weeks.
It all began as a simple conversation, of going to her house to start organizing and collecting her things, getting the house ready to sell, because we had known for a long time the house would not remain in the family. That is a story for another day, but to make a very long and sensitive story short, we had known this fact for many years, and now it was time to act. When I found out my mom would be going to her house, I spoke up and said I wanted to photograph her house... I just knew somewhere inside it was what I wanted to do, not just for me, but for my mom. This house was never going to be the same without my grandmother, and I could already feel the details of memories starting to slip. The funny part was, I just so happened to have five rolls of black and white film laying around. I had ordered them just to play with after all of my photography classmates had been shooting film all quarter. I had never purchased those rolls for any reason in particular, but I took them up to my grandmother's house with me, and they became the most expressive medium for what I found.
We first entered the house, and everything was dark. To make things worse, the kitchen light didn't have a bulb, another light didn't work at all, and it was a grey day outside. I was upset, because I figured my film wouldn't be able to capture what I wanted in these conditions, and I was already working without a light meter that day. I had brought my digital camera along just in case, but it didn't feel like the camera I wanted to use. I opened my aperature and dropped my shutter speed to as low as I could to avoid too much camera shake, and I went in shooting, starting with the dark kitchen.
I shot the whole house, or what I could photograph that day. It was a rush job. In and out. We couldn't stay very long that day because my uncle who lived there had to leave the house. As I left I was terribly flustered, and even more so the notion of never getting to say goodbye was weighing on my conscience, Already her house felt different. Already things had changed. Photos had been removed from frames, there were doors off hinges and evidence of emotional disruption, everything still so dark. It didn't feel like her house at all.
Nonetheless, I went back two days later to gather more photographs and help my mother collect some items, and again we were rushed. I became stubborn this time, determined to get the photos I wanted, because something told me this would be the last time I ever got to set foot in my grandmother's home.
It was. And I was glad I was stubborn. While I was being urged out of the house I snapped what I could on both cameras, a digital hanging around my neck and a small pentax cranking in my hand. We were going out the backdoor, and as I was walking through the backyard to leave, I stopped to take two more shots: one of my shadow on the side of the house as I photographed evidence of my own presence here, and a last second self portrait. I didn't even know what camera settings I was on. It was an attempt to take one last shot of myself in her backyard where I would never get to be again. To this date it is my favorite self portrait. It didn't matter about the focus or the film grain, or the sun flare that blew out over the top of my head, or even the dark eyes behind the aviators I was wearing. It all came down to the lines of my throat and my jaw, which look so much like my grandmother's. This self portrait haunts me a little when I put it beside her photograph, and it was the last photograph I took at her house. It felt fitting once I saw it. I don't know if I've ever been so attatched to an image of myself like this one.
Meanwhile, back in the regular world, I was three weeks away from finals week at school, and I was taking three studio classes, meaning I needed to produce three final bodies of work.
I didn't do any of that. I threw all of the projects I had in progress out. Everything ground to a halt once I developed that film, and my grandmother's photographs became my new focus.
I was taking a Historic Photographic Processes class, and had already decided on cyanotypes for my final, and I was taking a Book Arts class, and had decided those cyanotypes would then be fashioned into a book. The book was originally going to be about the color Blue and how it is important to me, in my personal life and as an artist, but I hadn't yet decided on the content of that book, so it didn't matter that I threw that silly idea away for something much more fitting of blue hand printed pages.
I locked down in the darkroom for what felt like ages. I scanned film for many nights and dusted and cleaned and adjusted the levels of each image... I cried at the computer screen, and tears fell into my darkroom trays on several occasions.
In the end, I produced a book, A SINGLE BOOK, as my other two copies were either incomplete because I had run out of paper, or the prints were not of the best quality. The paper I had chosen was a Kitikata rice paper, extremely thin but very ethereal in its weight and texture. I loved the look of cyanotype on this thin transparent paper, but it was indeed a difficult medium to work with. I turned in the books I had made, and I was decently proud of them. Everyone who saw the images or touched the single finished copy of the book absolutely loved it. I had one of the most amazing and heartfelt critiques from my peers. I felt relief when I passed all three of my classes. I turned the book in on the last day of finals, and then drove off to Tybee Island to go scatter my grandmother's ashes.
If you have read this far, I commend you. It is a long story to tell, but all of that happened last year in three weeks time, in May to the very beginning of June. Now it is April of 2018, and it is the time of year when Savannah College of Art and Design has the Artist Book Competition in conjunction with the Artists Books Symposium. It has been my goal for a solid year now to remake those books to perfection, just like my perfectionist grandmother would have me do. I planned to enter that competition, just like my professors encouraged me to do. And I intended to win.
I spent the past two or three months slowly restarting the process of making a new edition of books, but this time I was making six copies: 5 editions and 1 artist proof. Each book contains 20 cyanotype pages, so I was making 120 cyanotype pages, and that didn't include the mess up prints. Needless to say, I wiped the art store out of rice paper twice trying to collect all I needed, I mixed chemicals with my friend in large amounts so we wouldn't run out of cyanotype, and I began staying late in the darkroom after class to finish these pages.
Last week was the culmination of my work. Three veeeery long nights were spent perfecting the last of my cyanotype prints, drying the pages, pressing the pages, stacking and sorting and organizing, folding into signatures, measuring the book covers, covering said book covers, stitching the books all together, hand writing the colophon and the title, and even painting a small gold star on the front. I finished it all on Sunday with only one hour to spare before the competition deadline.
I didn't even wash my face or brush my teeth. I had been up working in my bathrobe since I had woken up, and I dashed to my room to throw on some clothes and throw my hair up in a bun. In one minute flat I was out the door, racing to Atlanta to submit my books. I made it to the library with fifteen minutes to spare. I filled out the entry form. I double checked my book for flaws, and I submitted it.
And when it was all said and done, I walked outside to my car with this tremendous weight lifting off my shoulders. And I cried.
I cried out of relief, and pain, and fulfillment, and emptiness.
I had finally remade the books like I had planned all along. I was FINALLY satisfied with them. I was finally done losing sleep over them. I was finally done with this project.
What I didn't realize was that a year later I would still be carrying around the loss of my grandmother, but I am. At this point in time I have no idea if I will win this competition, as I am waiting on that announcement as we speak. But if I were to win, the awards ceremony would take place just 17 days shy of a year anniversary of her passing. Again, I find life to work in mysterious ways, that it is this time of year again and here I am rehashing these emotions, these photos, this project. But this has all been very cathartic in a sense, to finally put that pain to rest, to finally close the chapter on that project, to finally move on.
The text within the book has always been the same. It is a letter I wrote after the second time shooting at my grandmother's house after she died, I was driving home, alone, and at one point I wiped my nose, probably drying the snot away from crying again, but I had such a private, poignant moment. As I wiped my nose, I noticed the faint scent of my grandmother's perfume on my hand from rummaging through her clothes in her closet...I had never noticed that scent before, and it was so fleeting, and unexpected... again I had been shaken, and I went home immediately and wrote a goodbye letter to her containing all of the things I never got to say. That text was unaltered from my journal, and I put the whole letter in my books, as a message back to her, that I loved her and will never forget her. In essence, these books are not only in memory of my grandmother, but they contain all the things I wish I could have said in the end. It is my final gift to her, for her, and it is with bittersweet pleasure that I present these books to the world so that her name may be remembered.
Below are the images of the new editions I have made of "Helga." Each page was carefully printed and loved in the darkroom, air dryed on a wire rack for hours, folded and pressed, and all of it hand stitched. It took time and effort, but it was worth every single minute standing in the dark or stabbing my fingers with a bookbinders needle to make it. My grandmother wouldn't have me stop until it was done right. I didn't stop, and I am finally satisfied with my work. I hope I have made her proud.
Thank you for the time you took reading this post, It was difficult to write, and it took me down memory lane. I hope you find these books as full of inspiration and love as I do.
In dedication to Helga Hudson.
I love you always grandma.
~Astin
