Susana Arena

“Lost and Found: Mother”

2022

My project is called “Lost and Found: Mother.” It is composed of 12 works on paper and a series of wooden objects that I made as a response to my mother’s death this year. The works on paper are watercolor, ink and acrylic paint, and the sculptural pieces are made from found roofing tiles from New England, my mother’s native home. Imagery for these works was inspired by photographic portraits of my mother, tombstones from New England towns, and objects (papers, books, pressed flowers) discovered in my mother’s house after her death. 

The project is about reckoning with the absence of the loved one, The Mother. The memory that becomes a blank. The family photograph that is so familiar and yet becomes a void. The work is  about loss, but also about finding a continuity between generations of women, the endless cycle of birth and death. Witnessing a dying mother and, at the same time, a blossoming daughter. 

The abstract wooden shapes serve as talismans, magical attempts to find, to mark, to preserve, to honor– my mother. Thinking of my mother while making this work was a way for me to start to heal loss and to find her again.