A Lovely Capitve
I created this "book" to speak about my mother ‘s illness, her cognitive decline with its ability to warp reality. She has late stage Alzheimer's Disease. I wonder at her complete vulnerability. An old coloring book belonging to my brother and me offered a platform with which to revisit my early memories while imagining what it was like for my mother being a country girl turned career woman in the mid fifties. What shaped the woman who shaped me? Who takes care of whom – when and why? In addition to the coloring book itself I drew from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Mass., Wednesday, May 9, 1962. In 1962 my mother would have been 29 and myself, 5. It happens this paper was targeting Mother’s Day in most of its ads. I also gathered diagrams from an operating manual to an early Admiral television belonging to my folks. The manual showed multiple examples of poor picture quality along with instructions on how to correct the problem. These diagrams represent the varied exhibition of brain deterioration. This book contains all of the coloring book pages with the exception of the original coloring book cover. For an innocent yet emotive image I constructed a cover pulling images and text from a separate coloring book and collaging them onto a mono print.
This is my story line, not unrelated to the original text:
spread 1
The zine opens showing, among other things, a collection of extra button envelopes. These were collected during the 40 years my mother shopped to dress the part in the banking industry. The envelopes stare out in worthless boredom, unable to mend a brain ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease. The first official page introduces us to little tweet and fractured memories.
spread 2
The coloring book’s story line follows our journey, my mother and me, starting with the return of my father from the service, his military number, the address book he used in the service and a bird carrying an omen bound in string.
spread 3
The bride, alias: little tweet, is my mother who returns “home”. Travelers pass by smiling, pretending not to notice her house has vanished.
spread 4
A cat’s cradle looms over little tweet as everything she has constructed evaporates revealing the farce.
spread 5
Helpful bunny adorned in its girdle has an idea - if only a magic controller could fix the problem.
spread 6
The man owl boasts of progress, grasping, occupying, owning. If he were truly wise he would understand just how temporary time on earth is.
spread 7
Chipmunk eagerly talks about morality, selection and rejection - of randomness.
spread 8
Doom and gloom are about to engulf crestfallen little tweet when Colleen appears carrying a home for tweet, a home void of tweet’s sweetheart but a good one just the same.
spread 9
And there we make happy, as happy can be made. We sing, well… at least I do and when my mother’s eyebrows rise I know she too is singing.
spread 10
The back page contains keepsakes and a daily account of kisses given, more often than not, reciprocated. After my dad’s passing it was important to me that my mother keep her muscle memory of a kiss. Nearly every night for close to two years I ask my mother for a kiss and then kiss each of her cheeks. I charted her responses during the time I worked creating these images and printing the corresponding zine.
Note:
Based on the amount of actual (original) coloring done in this coloring book, my brother and I fought over the book’s ownership more than we actually colored in it. Now it is mine and it is complete… in a sense.