Too Sad for Society (diptych)
Morphine Dreams 20” x 30” Archival inkjet prints from chemigrams 2020-2024
In my series, Morphine Dreams, I turned to abstraction to process the grief of losing my parents ten weeks apart in the same year after three months of extremely intense caretaking while they simultaneously, and very rapidly, declined. My parents very much wanted to die at home, so we chose hospice care for both. Hospice shifts end-of-life focus from treating the illness, to patient comfort. The cost is entirely covered by Medicare. So, in addition to a raised toilet seat, wheeled-walker, and a medical-grade bed with rails, patients who choose hospice are prescribed all the pain-reliving medication they desire. My parents, conservative teetotalers, had not experienced opiates before. Their dreams and conversations provided a bit of comic relief as their words became increasingly obscure. Each piece within the series is titled with the conversations, musing, and dreams of my mother or father in their final days.
When they passed away, alongside a lifetime of possessions found in my parents' house was what seemed like a lifetime of prescription medications. For me, the deep desire to have my parents alive again displayed itself in a desire to keep their possessions—even the inconsequential things— all the while logically knowing that I had no use for most of their belongings. What came of this part of the process of grief, are these images – chemigrams made from of the leftover prescription medication and unused body oil. The chemigram process involves painting a relief onto photographic paper (silver paper) and moving it between fixer and developer. The relief washes away in uneven bits, leaving behind a unique abstract work with unpredictable patterns and colors. In this series, I used a mixture of the prescription medication and leftover baby oil or body lotion from my parents’ house for the relief. The pieces you see here are scans of the original chemigrams that have been enlarged and printed on archival paper.