Guillemette

Guillemette entertains the idea that I have inherited supernatural abilities within my maternal family lineage and explores the thin boundary between understanding self in relation to family, mediumship and theater, and the spirit and earthly world.

 Staring into the damp darkness of the log cabin I listened to the murmured voices of the other girls telling stories. I was around 10 years old and at sleepaway camp in Northern Maine. I can’t remember our exact conversation or whether it was the year a girl talked about how some boys will eat girls' dried period blood during sex. What I do remember was staring at my hand as the girls talked. I focused on my dim blue fingers, and the spider coated wooden beams behind, shifting my eyes back and forth between the two. “I can see through things” reverberated through the room. There had been a lull in conversation when the words came floating out of my mouth. The girls gasped in unison. Or maybe I just remember it this way.

In a sense, I wasn’t lying. I could see through things, but not any more than anyone else can. What I was referring to, but did not disclose, was the sensation of looking at an object that is thin or small and being able to see “through” or past it because of its size, something I would do often to entertain myself. Deep down I knew that I was lying or stretching the truth—but if anyone could see through things, it would be me, and soon, I just hadn’t figured out how yet.

My confidence was informed by a long lineage of family members who also firmly believed in the power of the supernatural, as recounted to me throughout my life by my mother. She spoke of my grandmother, who had psychic abilities and repeated encounters with spirits; my great-grandfather who was a healer, believer in dreams, and occultist; and my uncle, whose life had been ruined by anorexia and substance abuse because a medium told him he would die by the age of 40. Finally, there was my mother herself, who spoke often of astrology, analyzing people in our lives based on their star signs and when something inexplicable would happen to us, she would point out, only half-joking, that it was because she had been named after a Medieval witch, Guillemette, who was burned at the stake.

In my project, Guillemette, I entertain the idea that I have inherited supernatural abilities that exist within my maternal family lineage. Making photographs inspired by my own dreams and sporadic visions, I take the role of spirit medium to explore links between my ancestral and personal histories; using magic to build a sense of self. In my photographs, time, place and subject matter are constantly shifting and metamorphosing; a house with antique furniture becomes a paper model of a house, a girl in a blue dress becomes a stick figure drawing on a hand, and the women depicted morph between casted strangers, family members and myself. The series, structured like a mystery trying to solve itself, walks the thin boundaries between building an understanding of self in relationship to family, between mediumship and theater, and between the spirit and earthly world.