A Picture of Health: Art and The Mechanisms of Healing

AMAM, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio (2015-16)

Rebecca Cross, Shadow Memory, 2015

Cross’ Shadow Memory was made in response to the tragic death of her daughter, Emma Coleman (to whom this exhibition is dedicated), at age 19 in 2011. Using the traditional Japanese technique of shibori—a  method of dying and forming fabric—Cross’ work expresses loss through its very form. She begins by tying an object in silk, immersing it in dye, rinsing it, removing the object, and letting it dry. Through this process the object is gone, but a memory of it remains, forever imprinted in the fabric. 

After Emma’s death, Cross has continued working, because it is a way to remember her daughter and an opportunity to think about her. Although the experience of making is not cathartic for Cross, it is productive; it is doing something in response to Emma’s death and a way of existing in a space beyond time in which she can focus on being close to Emma as she works. Through making Cross engages in a dialogue, one which she continues with Emma, who is forever by her side, even after death.

Cross’ work plays with metaphors of ethereality and permanence, weight and levity. The shadows cast by the work create meaning also. They recall the ancient story of the potter’s daughter, who traced the profile of her lover’s shadow on a wall as he lay sleeping, on the eve of his departure from her. For Cross, as for the potter’s daughter, shadows are a way of making present something that is forever absent. 

from A Picture of Health: Art and the Mechanisms of Healing. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Oberlin, Ohio (2015-16). Curated by Oberlin College Assistant Professor Christina Neilson and SUNY Buffalo State Associate Professor Frances Gage, with the assistance of Kevin R. E. Greenwood, the AMAM’s Joan L. Danforth Assistant Curator of Asian Art.