Honeymoon in Finland
Inspiration for my recent projects has come from discovering an album of family photographs sadly abandoned in an antique mall in Denver, Colorado. After looking at the photographs for ten years, I felt so connected to the people and places in the album that I had an uncanny sense of knowing the photographer. An internet search revealed that Nina Weiste, who was of Finnish descent, made the photographs in 1917 while attending teacher’s training at the State Normal and Industrial School in Ellendale, North Dakota. Nina’s photographs inspire my projects. However, a significant outcome was the recognition that childhood sexual trauma produced a healing space within my imagination for Nina Weiste to reside. In that space, Nina has become my partner. As a psychological construct, the relationship offers a productive terrain to contemplate the creative potential of interconnection. I married an idea. I married possibility.
The initial project celebrated the intersection of my family album and Nina's, resulting in the publication of a book, “Family Album” (2017). The second project, "Honeymoon in Finland," was inspired by discovering Nina’s grave in the same Denver neighborhood where I previously found her photographs. I constructed a shrine with an assemblage of Nina’s 1917 family photographs around her gravestone. Positioning her photographs within my own generated a reassuring sense of intimate proximity. Capitalizing on such assurance, I produced high-resolution scans from a selection of Nina’s photographs, plus photographs of female Finnish settlers and their female descendants from family albums preserved within the collections of two local museums near Nina’s Dakota birthplace. I printed life-sized photographs from the scans and then juxtaposed them with myself in various project-specific sites in the Dakotas and Finland.
