“‘Jane,’” 2020. Embroidery thread on linen. 48”x70.”
“Jane” is a woman with early-onset dementia. For her privacy, I’ve changed her name in a nod to Jane Doe, the default mystery woman.
I first came to know Jane through an album I purchased secondhand of Hall & Oates concert photographs. There was a “property of” bookplate on the inside cover of the album; so I found her online and, little by little, was able to piece together who Jane is and was. From her Facebook profile, I could see that she was a gifted photographer; an activist; a world traveler; an amateur storm chaser; an Elton John superfan; a woman with all of these interests, stories, and memories that might be fading from her mind, but are preserved forever in fragments - however incomplete, however incoherent - that remain available for a stranger like me to find online.
As her stories and memories break down into their component parts for storage online, so do photographs into pixels; so does the labor of needlework into one tiny stitch at a time. These acts each preserve one layer of meaning while destroying another. Ultimately, is this Jane’s portrait or mine?