What is loss? What is memory? How does one live their life? What do they leave behind? What is their worth? This art installation, A Life Undone, connects to my earlier installation work, Nothing Was Ever Said (1993). These bodies of work excavate artifacts from two generations of two interconnected lives within my family exploring themes of dis(ease) within a person and our social welfare system.

My father was a woodworker and a carpenter. In 2019 he left behind the house he built for our family in the late 1960s. After my mom, sister and I moved out, he lived with cats as companions for decades. The detritus and equipment in David’s Kitchen (2019) offers us entrée into A Life Undone. This kitchen began with a stovetop purchased on March 1, 1972 for $81.05; after years of neglect it became an abode unfit for people or cats. Yet David defiantly lived in this house for many years—even after the well went dry—refusing offers of help from others.

My current work weaves together the personal and the political. A Life Undone critiques a “welfare” system that deemed my father’s home fit for habitation. Similarly, the health “care” system offered my father little or no support; one where people gave him ultimatums instead of trying to listen and understand him. He lived in a home he built in the 1960s. Over time it fell into disrepair. His house became filled with feces, debris, the stench of ammonia from years of cat urine, mouse chewed papers, an unusable stove, and it lacked running water after his well ran dry.

My sibling and I inherited a decrepit house full of wood and metal intended for projects he never completed. Despite my complicated memories of times within the rough-hewn wooden floors, I connect moments in time (writing and old family photographs) with artifacts collected to honor A Life Undone?