Palm Drive, 1998-2021
Photogravures on gampi
24 by 21 inches
Palm Drive is an archive of photographs that are rooted in the everyday experience around my maternal grandmother's home. Made over a period of more than twenty years, the pictures describe domestic life passing against the fading grandeur of the home's interior and the visible patterns of absence and presence. I transformed my earliest black-and-white photographs through the photogravure process and printed them on gampi, a translucent, hand-made paper that is as thin as human skin. Relying on the memories of my grandmother’s home from years before, I printed the images using varying ink colors and sheets of gampi. I perceive the works as objects as much as they are images. The reinterpretation of my early work becomes an extended meditation on mortality. After my grandmother's death, my parents moved into her house. Recently, I continued photographing the house as my parents have, too, grown older resulting in entropic changes around their home. Collectively, they are songs of mourning that I have been steadily performing through photography and the painstaking photogravure process.
–Stephen Hilger