Lost Art

About Lost Art…

In June of 2019, my grandmother, Marjorie Aileen Johnson, passed away rather suddenly due to the complications of a stroke. She was the matriarch of our family and we were very close, so this was a tremendous loss. She was an artist in her own right, and she left behind a massive library of unfinished work. These projects were incredibly valuable to my grandmother. She instilled a great sense of her identity in her work, as well as her ambitions and values.

This work, titled Lost Art, involves documenting the space in which my grandmother worked on her projects within her home. My goal is to capture the care that my grandmother took in her work, to show how she valued these objects, and inversely, to show how this value is now lost, since many of these objects will never be completed. I approach this by bringing attention to the level of detail that my grandmother put into her craft: hand-painted eyelashes, color-coordinated thread on neatly organized shelves, etc. By showing the many varying levels of completion, or lack thereof, between these different porcelain dolls, I aim to illustrate the loss in their value. Had these dolls been completed before she passed, perhaps they still might have some value as dolls to be sold or enjoyed by others, but since they have not been completed, and likely never will, this can not happen, and the value that they once had to my grandmother is now stripped from them, leaving them to a grim, purgatorial fate. Perhaps with the creation of this body of work, some of their value can be returned to them once more.