Reverie
My grandmother has a kind of dementia that progressively changes how she thinks and communicates. First we watched her lose words in frustration. Then sentences were cut in half, leaving her in a sad silence. But as the condition worsened, there came a surprising relief. She seems to have transcended the murky middle between knowing and not-knowing, and has entered a deeper instinctual state – not overthinking, not self-aware, but a conveyer of ungrammatical thoughts and feelings filled with love.
The full person that she is combines with the current limits of her brain to generate a kind of poetic speech. It is the core of a human that once knew more, but still knows something.
From a phone conversation in September 2023, I recorded my grandmother’s half-sentences. Rambling and meandering, there remains a strong sense of herself: love and levity and the desire to connect.
I created a sequence of simple instructions that let me forever access the kinds of meanings I found in her speech. These steps for art making, like Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, use the randomization inherent to generative processes while maintaining the elegant simplicity of their formal components (in this case: words instead of shapes).
Beyond the particular words that are the modules of this generative art series, these instructions allow anyone to preserve meaningful language as art.
