The Longest Time Since I've Seen You, Video Performance, 2021.
This maintenance performance examines grief as an ongoing process of loss experienced both during caregiving and after death. Through caregiving, we often lose a loved one multiple times as illness gradually transforms the person we know. The work reflects on this experience of anticipatory grief, as well as the final separation of body, mind, and spirit that follows death.
In the performance, I undertake the repetitive act of scrubbing a floor, an everyday form of maintenance labour. Wearing my late grandmother's dress, my body becomes a reflection of hers, collapsing distinctions between past and present, memory and embodiment. As the dress absorbs water and gathers dirt from the floor, it becomes entangled with the labour of cleaning, much as grief becomes entwined with the routines of everyday life.
The work considers maintenance as both physical and emotional labour, drawing attention to the often-invisible acts of care that sustain people, relationships, and memory. Through repetition and endurance, the performance reflects on how loved ones continue to live within us through gesture, habit, and embodied knowledge. Grief is not separate from daily life but embedded within it, carried through ordinary actions that become acts of remembrance.
Film Stills triptych, Archival pigment print on cotton paper, 4 of 5 editions remain. 2021.