Invisible Companions
2023
Invisible Companions
I am drawing people who have passed away at different times in my life yet have remained uniquely present in my awareness as “invisible companions.” Are they ancestors? Yes. I think they are because each “possess this in-between quality of the flown soul and the hovering presence. They seem to have a kind of materiality and an exalted awareness; they also display an immateriality, a repose and introspective serenity that suggest they inhabit a timeless dimension.”
Drawing these portraits became a bit like time traveling. Aging some people who passed away decades ago to catch up to where I am now in time, or freezing others in a past that I had to travel backwards to. I had to reconcile two contrary experiences of re-membering – what is lost, broken and fragmentary with what is present, complete and unified.
I knew these drawings would be cathartic for me but I did not know how relational they would also be for me. By Inviting in beloveds who had passed away, I briefly created imaginary friends that took on form and then vanished.
“Re-membering is the re-aggregation of one’s members, the figures who properly belong to one’s life story, one’s own prior selves, the significant others, without which the story cannot be completed. Re-membering, then, is a purposeful, significant unification, different from the passive, continuous, fragmentary, flickering of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness. The focused unification provided by remembering is requisite to sense and order. Through it, a life is given shape that extends back in the past, and forward into the future…” - Barbara Myerhoff, 1980
