Moth Prints

My childhood was full of strange superstitions: never sleep with your feet toward the door; hide your thumbs from a passing funeral procession; don’t drive raw pork over the Pali highway. One superstition in particular declared that giant moths embodied the spirit of an ancestor returning to visit the living. The evening after my father’s ashes were scattered in the bay outside of my childhood home, a giant black moth perched above the bathroom door and lingered for almost an hour. On the one-year anniversary of his passing, my mother discovered a giant moth upon returning from a visit to the graveyard. 

 

I am fascinated with the unseen currents that guide and shape our lives; the patterns, formed by our ancestry and family history, that linger just behind the curtain of our understanding or observation, ripples from a distant shore. I see the images in my Moth Prints as a collection of meditations on memory, superstition, ancestry and ultimately, grief. I am intrigued by the construction of superstition and myth as a method of reconciling the unknown and the unknowable. Through the use of symbolism and repetitive mark making, these prints have been my way of processing the ambiguities of life, the mystery lingering just outside of my field of view.