Shadow of My Grey Grandma
Description
Shadow of My Grey Grandma tells contradictory stories about an important figure in my life—my grandma—to mimic the ambiguous nature of memories and the grey areas of human beings. I grew up with her from birth until college; she runs through all my pre-adulthood memories. But I can no longer recall details about her or the things that happened. What remains are emotions mixed with “facts” that may not even be true. Someone so essential in my life has become merely a collection of emotions.
In my memory, she is ambiguous. I don’t know if she loved or hated animals, if she loved or hated my grandpa, if she longed for or resented her village. She did things proving both—and denying both—at the same time. With all these twisted memories, I can never truly know who she was. But one thing is certain: she was grey, like everyone.
I chose cyanotype to create this book because it uses shadows to form images, distorting reality in the process. It is a book of my memories, written accounts of the past paired with blurry images to suggest the fact that these are only memories and emotions. In the end, the reader will be told: none of it was true.
Bound in a dragon-scale style, the book remains exposed once unrolled, a metaphor for memory—we believe we can access any moment at will. But can we? Do we truly remember, or do we reconstruct? Roll the memories up again, place them in a container like the one my grandma used to hold eggs and hung around my neck before sending me to school. Or did she?
