I Shall Never Tire of Representing Her*

After my mother’s death her belongings went untouched for many months until, one night, unable to sleep, I opened a drawer. A dozen sets of rosary beads—tremendously meaningful in my mother’s spiritual practice—came tumbling into my possession. While rosary beads did not hold spiritual significance for me, I nonetheless hung them in my studio, allowed them to haunt me, to possess me. Slowly they revealed—day after day, bead after bead—the texture of the years, the decades of my mother’s life to me.

The title, I Shall Never Tire of Representing Her, comes from a letter written by Louise Bourgeois to describe her repetitive representation of her mother in her own work.