To open my mother’s bedside drawer is to follow the rabbit down into a tunnel of home videos played back in my mind, of daydreams about who she might be today, of who we might be together. Sifting through what she left behind—the small watch that she wore daily, the bits of lace tatting she never finished—is never easy.

Setsuna is a small catalog of these findings from a life past, an attempt to capture a brief moment of time and render it more permanent. The printing of this paper is fashioned after the cyanotype, a process that uses the sun’s rays to convert the shadow of an object into a Prussian Blue image, a photogram of a moment soon to pass.

Available for purchase here.

I made this tissue paper as an attempt to hold on to the fleeting moments in time with my mother, who I lost over 20 years ago, and yet her passing feels as fresh as ever. The pencil & watercolor recordings of things she left behind in her bedside table were then rendered in a process reminiscent of faded sun prints, and printed on appropriately delicate sheets of tissue paper.

For anyone who has lost a loved one, for anyone who holds close even the smallest thing left behind, who feels their memories slipping away like water.
This is for you.