Mother & Child

The site-specific installation Mother & Child at the Rock House was my first community art project. I began to develop the idea for this work in January 2005. It was based on my previous installation-performance Siege that I exhibited on September 11, 2004 in the same venue. While in Siege I collaborated with my husband Sam, in Mother & Child I invited the residents living around the Salish Sea to submit portraits of themselves, their mothers and grandmothers. The installation took over both the exterior and the interior of the Rock House. Sam and I hung the pictures of the participants (the children) on fishing lines with paper clips on the exterior walls of the Rock House. We hung the portraits of the mothers and grandmothers on the kitchenette-living room and bathroom walls with tape. We ‘sandwiched’ all the images between two lines of text. The text was composed of articles headlines published by local newspapers (the Whidbey News-Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer) from the 1930s until 2005. We covered the floor of the kitchenette-livingroom and bathroom with rock salt.

The recorded vocalisations of the southern resident Orcas created the soundscape inside the building that seeped into the neighbourhood from the open door and windows. I choose the orcas’ vocalisations rather than the ones from other whales or dolphins because the orca is an animal that plays an important role in the Native American culture of the Pacific Northwest. It also captivates the imagination of non-natives who increasingly go to boat tours to look at these animals in their own environment. The Orcas that live in the Salish Sea are all-year-round residents. Their community is divided into smaller groups called pods. A pod is like an extended family. Orcas are highly social animals. Their offspring don’t leave their mothers, and the older females take on roles similar to human grandmothers. Each pod has developed a complex and unique dialect of calls, shrieks and whistles that distinguish one group from the other. I find these similarities between these animals and humans fascinating and intriguing. The portraits of the three generations of families that covered the walls of the house were black and white, colours that suggested the bodies of the orca whales.

I turned the familiar visual element of the family snapshots, charged with personal memories and history, into uncanny wallpaper that covered almost all the interior walls of the Rock House. The viewer could not get way from these people’s gazes, not even in the bathroom. The article headlines at the top and bottom of these portraits were a reminder that it is people’s perceptions and actions that determine what kind of relationship we establish with nature. The rock salt was an element that from a visual point of view blended the images and the interior of the house together and reflected the light like water. The salt was also another mean to displace the general notion of what the space of a house should look like. The viewer while walking on the salt crystals created a ‘crunchy’ sound that mingled with the recorded sounds of the orcas. Some children even drew images directly into the salt like it were sand on a beach. The expanse of the rock salt was a metaphor for the oceans and water in more general terms. Water is an element from which we were born, so the inside of the house with the floor covered in salt and the pictures of mothers and grandmothers on the walls was an allusion to a mother’s womb.

Mother & Child was an installation that aimed to build a bridge among the residents who live around the Salish Sea with their different backgrounds and personal history. Its goal was also to make a broader connection between us and nature to raise awareness on the importance of protecting natural resources because we are intrinsically part of nature and depend on it for our survival despite living in a highly industrialised society that is detaching us from it. Nature is very vulnerable to our indiscriminate and senseless actions. This work pointed out that we should act on a personal level first of all if we want to preserve and enjoy the incredible diversity of fauna and flora that still exist below and above the waters of the Salish Sea.