Excerpt from Musee Interview by Hallie Neely
Neely: What made you decide to create this project?
Hatry: I have to say that, first, I didn’t conceive the project as art. It began as the totally unanticipated way that I came to terms with death and with grief in my own life, and when I realized what potential it had and that I could share that, I was happy in the same way I am to share my art, but I only came to look at it more generally and to configure it as an art idea, and as an art idea that has taken on profound dimensions, in some way radically questioning the nature of our relationship to the art-work, while returning to what might be seen as a primordial feeling for both matter, in the most basic sense, and for the image as an essentially social, while deeply emotional artifact, as a result of my own painful experience.
When my father died 25 years ago, in what seemed to me at the time to have been suicide, I was devastated, and it took me quite a long time even to be able to think about him without breaking down crying. Then, in 2008, one of my closest friends committed suicide. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t been aware that he was feeling so despondent that he could do that, and not only was I inconsolable, but all of the unresolved pain of my father’s death also came back to the surface. I felt paralyzed with grief.
Being an artist, I naturally thought that the effect was caused by the, in this case very lengthy, process of making the portraits, but when a friend, whose mother had died when he was still rather young and with whom he felt he had a totally unresolved relationship, one that was cut short before they could know each other in the way he wanted, asked if I would make a portrait for him as well – with her actual ashes – I discovered that he had the same almost preternatural experience, both of the presence of his mother, and of an indescribable calm and consolation. That’s when I thought that this was a comfort that I could offer to others as well. And it turned out that I knew quite a lot of people who had ashes of loved ones that they felt were almost a burden, or were being disrespected, or shunted aside, by simply being stored in an urn or a box, and over a number of years I made portraits for some of them as gifts, always finding that their relationship to their beloved changed or was enriched in a range of interesting ways just by having this renewed contact with what they knew was the physical residue of the actual person they had loved.
Image: Germaine A. A. Charbonneau, 2016 Mosaic. (Loose ash particles from the person depicted, pulverized birch coal and white marble dust on beeswax) 14 x 11 inches © Heide Hatry.
