Guillemette

Guillemette entertains the notion of inherited mediumship in my ancestral blood line and how mediumship itself, parallels the flimsy barrier between the real and the imaginary in familial oral history and how these are activated through performance.

When my great-grandfather was at the end of his life, he wrote a pocket-sized memoir on his relationship to spirituality. He stresses the significance of dreams and symbols and states that the imaginary world is as substantive as the real world, if you are paying attention. As a child, I remember lying in bed and staring into the darkness, waiting for something that never materialized. I had an uncanny sense that I had been either cursed or blessed with some kind of ability to see what others around me could not. I was paying attention. 

Growing up, my mother cultivated an environment where supernatural stories and occult ideas flowed seamlessly into everyday life. She spoke of my grandmother, who had psychic abilities and repeated encounters with spirits. There was 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. Then 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 burnt at the stake. Guillemette entertains the notion of inherited mediumship in my ancestral blood line and how mediumship itself, parallels the flimsy barrier between the real and the imaginary in the dark, murky cave that is familial oral history.

As I have further explored my family's history and other figures, such as my great-grandfather, emerge, a similar theme occurs: an engagement with art and performance as a means of channeling a personal alignment with spirituality. In Guillemette, I explore the channeling of mediumship or ‘seeing’ through the act of image-making. My process has consisted of speaking with mediums, writing down dreams, visiting occult spiritual sites and reading through family archives to conjure visions for photographs. The photographs, once they are made, become keys or messages to unlock the creation of new photographs and new meaning. In the series, there is a photograph of an old woman in a park reaching towards her eyes, to the right is a photograph of a detail from a painting of two angels extending their hands, bathed in the light of the forest canopy, and a few images away is an individual, painted white, lying contorted in a spotlight on a black backdrop. Having these three ‘types’ of images alongside each other create a multi-dimensional world of images that speak to reality, memories or dreams, and complete fiction or performance. Guillemette, navigates the misty passages between the real and the imaginary in mediumship, photography, and in family history itself.