Little Selves
Mary Lerner, 1916
As she prepares to die, an elderly woman resurrects memories of her previous selves over the course of her life. She summons her memories one by one, seeing her selves as a “procession of little girls” appearing as pictures in the gallery of her mind. She worries that these little selves will die along with her. In order to preserve them, she recounts her memories aloud to her niece. I created twelve collages – one for each of the letterforms in the title, combined with a silhouette of a woman’s head. I transferred these collages into concrete as an act of preserving the memory in a permanent material. The concrete tiles are misshapen, inverted, and difficult to read – a visual manifestation of memory’s distorted quality. The leftover paper collages, rough and torn from the concrete casting process, were folded into envelopes to contain each corresponding tile. The envelopes are held in a concrete box reminiscent of a tomb and a card catalog. The object becomes both a cover and a monument to the story. Its form embodies the essence of the narrative – ideas of multiple selves, reflection, and preservation – as well as the memory of the construction process.
