Can I break a family code?

I began this body of work with a challenge:

Can I break a family code?

In these mixed media works, I’ve combined traditional materials — paint, pencil and inks— with some of the hundreds of old letters, newspapers, and journals that belonged to my father. He died of a heart attack one morning after we had left for school. I was 11 and immediately adopted the unspoken family code: Don’t show emotion, and don’t talk about death. If a kid can’t speak out loud about the person she misses, she can certainly hold onto him in taped-shut cardboard boxes for more years than I care to count.

Until now.

With this body of work, I am talking about death. 

I am making fragments of my father visible. I am creating with loss as I rip, cut, paint, sand, arrange, consider, glue, and paint again. I spend hours with his gentle presence and writings in the process. 

The letters and loss are here, yes, but so are the bright colors of New Mexico: the deep dots that cedars make on the mesas, sumptuous drips of snowmelt, deep shadows of canyons, whites of clouds, and warm afternoon sunshine. I am hoping my father, wherever he is, approves. And I hope viewers get to see how lives can be reunited —first through imagination — then held more firmly together with lightness, joy and the letting go of silence.