Mary Kolada Scott
Letting the Dust Settle (2018)
collage and mixed media on canvas
25 x 25 in.
$1,000
“I spent 2017 dealing with endings – retiring from a job I’d held for 24 years, burying my 96-year-old stepmother in June, and then moving my grieving father to a skilled nursing facility where he died three months later at the age of 97.
While clearing the house they had shared for 26 years, I collected ephemera, such as music sheets, newspaper clippings, a canceled check from my father’s print shop, and a handwritten entry from my mother’s journal (she had died 30 years earlier).
Now I keep these in a new context. There is a layer of mystery surrounding the bits and pieces. What they kept, what mattered greatly once, became immaterial at death and then became material for my art.
I’m not sure what to make of them except in a collage. I’m taking time to allow the dust to settle. That’s how I process loss, sifting through the pieces left behind, before I move on.”
© Mary Kolada Scott