"Mother Memory" (Art Exhibit Series, 9/10)
Toti O’Brien
The following is part of the Mother Memory art exhibit series, a pairing of literature with art curated by the exhibitor, Toti O’Brien. Oyster River Pages is pleased to present this series in weekly installments.
The poem I chose encapsulates a sudden presentiment—the intuition that the mental decline experienced by my elder mother would intersect my state of displacement (from my land and language of birth), and a sense of what might derive from such an entanglement. I obscurely felt that, as Mother found it harder and harder to verbally express notions, events, names belonging to our common past, that universe—already endangered by distance—would utterly annihilate itself. I believe that my unexpected feelings were both true and false. There is truth within the collective—or just shared—aspect of memory, which needs to embody itself in a story, testimonial, common ritual, not to shatter into frayed mental shards, only accessible to the consciousness of those who produce them. On the other hand, sometimes we need the silence of the “owners of memory” (those who spawn and pass down the official narratives), in order to dissolve ancient spells and let other stories rise (as if from the sands of a dried-up river-bed), or at least allow fragments to realign in different fashion, showing what was missing so far—the profile of the shadow.
Mother Tongue
by Toti O’Brien
How it crumbles
like pebbles slipping between your fingers.
Oh, the number of rings you possess.
Aren’t jewels stones?
Only
when your brain has scattered
like beads on a carpet
you start marveling at the uselessness
of redundant adornment.
Gold is dust
swallowed by lazy waters.
After a long season of draught
riverbanks are sunken
and a reek of mud fills our nostrils
as we walk.
Your step has become unsteady
one of your feet, askew
skids on its own course.
Mother tongue
as you lose it
the universe falls apart.
All of my past implodes
as its vessel gives in.
Cracks, leakage
infiltration were bearable.
Now this rupturing ends the empire.
Such sadness.
Like a flight of swallows
headed to Neverland.
With your silence
long-lasting spells will subside
something whispers into my ear.
Not a comforting sound
but the metallic utterance of a toy frog
whose mechanics are breaking
as your lips harden.
If the spell will dissolve
what will remain?
A dryness of bones
a flayed snake
as defenseless as a severed length
of garden hose.
I’ll become an alphabet
unknown to myself
a satchel of un-deciphered symbols
yet another story untold.
Nancy Kay Turner | A Moveable Feast (detail) | Installation | 2025
Nancy Kay Turner self-defines “an accidental archivist and alchemist using humble materials (such as wax paper, burnt parchment paper, staples, tea bags, cabinet cards) to tell forgotten stories of love, loss, longing and desire.” Despite the imposing size, her installations evoke a feeling of levity, and a tenuous vibe—a kind of muffled, soft drone. Such effect is due both to the delicacy of the materials used, and to the subdued color palette, now infused with grey and black, now with shades of ocher and rust, or else white and cream, together with silver and gold. Even when they hang from above like giant curtains or they spread across the floor like carpets, Turner’s wide palimpsests don’t appear to aggress the surrounding space. They rather tend to excavate it, digging a niche of shade, a quiet temple that attracts the viewers into an oasis of peaceful rest. The background on which the artist collages and assembles a number of found objects (and pictures, and documents, daily residue from a past bygone) is all except neutral. Frequently made out of leftovers (architectural, domestic, industrial) overlaid, dyed, charred by fire or sunbeams, soaked, torn, or eroded, it’s a sort of live tissue, a membrane belabored by time. On its skin blooms—in small cameos, focused, enigmatic, evocative—a narrative wrought with things lost, and then found again.
A graduate of Queens College, CUNY, University of California at Berkeley, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Nancy Kay Turner is a multidisciplinary artist using assemblage, collage, artist books and site-specific installations to examine time, the domestic sphere, memory and the collective unconscious. Her work is in private, public and corporate collections, including Warner Brothers Studios, ABC Studio, Glendale College, Chiat/Day Advertising Agency. She has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Turner’s writing on art has been published in a number of journals such as Artweek, Artscene, and Art and Cake. Her artwork is featured in numerous magazines such as New Visionary Magazine, The Power of Feminist Art, and Echoes of Yesteryear. Her essays have been published in Perceive Me, and Riot Material, AIDS Self-Portraits: Positive Art: Jeannie O’Connor. A transcription of Turner’s talk on the artist Roland Reiss’s at The Oceanside Museum of Art is archived at The Smithsonian. https://nancyturnerstudio.com/
