Essay for the Artist Book, [Re]collections & Earthly Artifacts

Lost & Found by Sheila Dickinson

I remember driving from Rochester to St. Paul along Highway 52, talking with Melissa on the phone a few years ago. I was lamenting about some shocking, unbelievable behavior I’d witnessed that had been a difficult experience for me. Melissa said something to the extent of – you’re stuck in one of life’s messy moments, just gotta get through it. When I look back, I can see that I was pretty naïve and that to others, these words may not seem cataclysmic. Yet her words fell on my ears with a wisdom and knowingness that I had not quite achieved yet. Perhaps it was the tone in her voice or her delivery, but this one comment stuck with me, resonating deeply. Her advice helped me through many other calamities, topped by pandemic woes. I have continually returned to her matter-of-fact phrasing and prescient insight that, essentially, shit happens and it's tough, but we need to be able to see the wreckage of the moment and move on. 

This tone and tenor emerges in Melissa’s work: in shipwrecks, in getting lost in the woods, in grief and farewells. The sense of being lost at sea, facing storms or finding oneself in troubled waters, washes over us repeatedly in [Re]collections. Each instance causes a reflective moment in order to take stock and appreciate the solid ground beneath us. She ensures we do not take stability for granted, letting us know that it could crumble beneath us at any moment. Taken out of the known and expected was a constant for Melissa, by choice through travel or not by choice, through the constant moving as a military family, through the revelation her father was gay, through caring for her mentally ill mother. We see that her work as an artist is to persist in her practice while the world around her is being undone. 

A retrospective feels unseemly at middle age because an artist always careens forward, but there are times when it’s necessary to gather all the work and see it there, in conversation, held by the four white walls. Her art catapulted out of the extra time lockdown afforded her to recollect/reminisce/remember, which hadn’t been given space or time during “normal” busy social and professional life. The pandemic caused many to feel an increased desire for the personal, to see the interior lives of others, to commiserate and connect. But [Re]collections does not display a confessional reveal; rather, a darkness seeps through to play in contrast with moments of light; to find ships, rocks, loved ones, trinkets, tchotchkes, latchkey rugs, snapshots and remembrance cards. For her, identity is mutating in its constant metamorphosis, delivered deadpan, frank and flat. The work manages to say, my light was taken some time back, but this darkness can also propel. To speak from grief, from pain, from the latchhook rug laid down for one last time: that is the courage our world may need right now. 

I met Melissa through Irish connections as we both have spent time in the West of Ireland and around Irish art schools. A Cailleach, or Crone, is mythologically associated with winter, cold and harsh wind. She rules the dark months between Samhain (Halloween) and Bealtaine (Spring). She is like the Bean Chaointe who perform the coainneadh or keen, a funeral fugue, with two other women at the three-day Irish wake. Keening is a dark, mournful wail, not so much a song, but a long moan that hovers the keeners between the living and the dead, liminal and in the veiled territory. Amongst the dead and lost in Melissa’s work are also the hidden and secret, things left in the dark. She, at times, becomes teacher and harbinger of the dark. The dark is a force; it is black and deep and it is feminine, the night, the felt, hard to see thus easy to overlook. Do not mess with this, do not call this rumbling, dark lilt forth without clear intentions of hearing the truth through its translation to light. Much like the camera, with its translation of form via the capture of light into a two-dimensional form, the truth revealed in this “factual” light appears today to be what it is and isn’t. The photo is static and frozen in time, showing what it was and what it will now be ad nausea, forever captured in that light. But can a photo capture the darkness that broods behind and around it? Can that feminine dark that knows of a different plight, a plight of unrepresented and perhaps unpresentable depths, be found in the camera’s frame? Wait now and be still in the force of the Cailleach, for with a sweep of her horsehair broom, the gallery plays out a story of a life that is both hidden and revealed. 

I wonder about the sound of memories, said and unsaid, released from the darkness, as they shift and rustle, overlap and overlay, heard here in the minor key, in melancholy and worry. All those birds cluttered and bunched together in a glass cabinet intended for the fragile and breakable. Not one bird can hear their own tweet for the cacophony of their many songs, each memory they represent, drowned out. But that dove! A symbol of hope/peace, ironic or iconic in this situ, does dominate the space. It sings of the way the dead in memoriam are shown in the best light possible. Yet her father’s portrait falters, slightly, rocked by the momentary shifts of perspective. Sorting through his lived years, many veiled in a deceit made necessary by prejudice, while also necessary to assure her own birth. Knowing that without this lie, she would not be here. The confusion perplexes the viewer as they shift forward and back, trying to see her father's face through the lenticular visual play. An articulation of a looping existential crisis. Lest we falter here, hovering in the messiness between the two possible images, in the liminal emotional vacillation between forgiveness and bitterness. The dove beckons from its elevated perch, signaling the eternal hope of reprieve from crises and confusion. Though the menagerie of melancholic melodies that quiver in the throats of the many birds may drown it out.