WATERMARKS:
Resonant Absences in Painting and Memory

By
Brenda Draney

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF APPLIED ART
In
Visual Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2009

Brenda Draney 2009 ©

ABSTRACT
This paper is about memory and about narrative, both of which are concerned with what is
missing. It explores the ways that the events in our individual lives, our collective lives,
become history and narrative. The paper considers writer Thomas King’s work on narrative,
and Walter Benjamin’s work on memory as theatre. Many of the stories included here are
personal. They might have been heard at kitchen tables, or on the phone from family and
friends. Some stories are ones which I can’t recall not knowing. The paper poses questions
such as how these things become important to our present. Whether and why it is
important to remember, and what constitutes authenticity in memory. The narrative
structure of the paper reflects these concerns, by highlighting spaces and absences. To an
extent the structure manifested itself organically, as a result of attempts to provide an
honest articulation of the questions and ideas which have impacted on my material
practice. This has proven to be a delicate task, as it attempts to speak to a material practice
that is ongoing, constantly changing. There are overlaps in the form and content of each
but there is also a space in between. My modus operandi resists full disclosure. I have this
image of myself, like I am in the backyard, in the dirt, excavating some things burying
others. From a certain vantage point all you see is the upturned soil following me, dirt
under my nails.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS..............................................................................................iii
LIST OF
FIGURES....................................................................................................................iv
INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................1
“Watermarks”...............................................................................................................2
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................29
APPENDIX A: PAINTINGS.......................................................................................31
APPENDIX B: MEDIA DOCUMENTATION..............................................................33

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LIST OF FIGURES
Hodgkin, Howard. Learning About Russian Music. Tate Collection, London..........14
Bonnard, Pierre. LeBain. Tate Collection, London..................................................22
---. Nu a la baignoire. Musee du Petit Palais Collection, Paris................................22
---. Nu dans le bain au petit chien. Carnegie Collection, Pittsburgh........................23

iv

Introduction (of sorts)
My cousin Irene and I sat across from each other. She looked at me, she was
studying my face. I waited for her to say something. She said, after a pause, “You
look... eager to please.” I did not like being that transparent, but it was true then
(over five years ago) and it still is. I am ambivalent, either about the transparency or
the eagerness to please, or both. Nevertheless, even now, I would like to oblige.
I could get some distance, put some space between myself and the paintings
I make, offer up an analysis or interpretation of sorts, perhaps a comparison to other
artists. I have not quite done that. Maybe I did not know how to begin. Maybe it
was something else. I could have written something that, like one of my paintings, I
ask to be independent in the world and create its own relationships and connections.
I did not quite do that either. So, what can I tell you that will be meaningful for me to
write and for you to read? I might not have even met you yet. This paper might be
akin to lighting candles in order to set the mood. I could make the light softer and
not even talk about the candles.
My sister is, as I write this, approximately twelve weeks along in her first
pregnancy, so I have been thinking about pregnancies. I asked my mom about
when she was pregnant with me, what she remembers. She told me she almost
died. She said she was feeling pains in her back, but her doctors ignored her
complaints. Then, while she was in labour, her fever spiked, and the doctors paid
attention. She said she passed out. “The last thing I remember is being lowered
into a tub of ice and water.” When she says this, her eyes get big and round and the
backs of her hands stand in for the rising water around her face. “Ohhh” she
breathes in, “’twas cold.” I lived thirty-two years without hearing that story.
1

Watermarks

“One must always apologize for talking about painting”
-Paul Valéry

There is a story. It is about the first painting. In Pliny the Elder’s tale, he
recounts the origins of painting. More accurately he recounts how the first painting is
known to have happened. The origins, he tells us, are unclear: The Egyptians think
it was in Egypt, the Greeks beg to differ. What is agreed on is that this was done by
tracing the outline of a man’s shadow. So he tells us what he can: A potter’s
daughter was in love with a young man. She knew the young man was going to
leave. Maybe he was visiting her to say good-bye. Maybe she wanted to buy some
more time. She traced his silhouette, as cast by a lamp. I imagine it was quiet; he
was trying to hold still for her, her eyes concentrating on the wall, her back to him.
Later, her father, the potter, pressed clay along this outline to make a relief. The
story resonates with me, perhaps because in the act of pointing toward a centre, a
circle is drawn instead. The lack of origin suggests to me an idea of countless
beginnings. Near my hometown of Slave Lake there is a place we call Old Town.
Actually it was named Sawridge, the name of the Indian Band I belong to. In my
memory of Slave Lake, Old Town stands like a bookmark for a story. The few
houses that still stand are all that was left when an entire town moved because of a
flood that happened before I was born. There is no particular location then, only a
story.

2

Lisa Saltzman 1 , in her book Making Memory Matter, writes about how Pliny
the Elder’s tale speaks of anticipating absence, remarking on absence, of memory.
She remarks on the difference between the daughter’s drawing, her outlining of an
absent figure, and her father’s creation of an object to fill that space. The daughter’s
action is the one Pliny the Elder associates with painting— the one which remarks
upon the empty space, but does not fill it. The potter follows up by creating an object
to stand in for the missing person. I imagine that he offered this object to his sad
daughter to make her feel better. Her pain was too difficult to watch. The act of
simply bearing witness is a powerful thing, for both daughter and father. Is a
memory or a story able to transcend a fetishizing? Is it only a talisman?
I have uncovered more questions than answers. I am asking how
photographs fall into parts of memory, both personal and collective, how personal
and collective memory mingles and then separates again. How much should we
remember? When is the memory fact? My interest, in part, is how the events in our
individual lives, in our collective lives, become memory, history, and narrative.
In “Surviving Images,” Marianne Hirsch 2 writes about trauma and its
relationship to memory. How memory can be fragmented. Adding photographs into
the mix complicates things nicely for me. I imagine all these photos from various
people and places, being moved around and continually rearranged in order to
speak to a memory, and then to another one. This opening up of a memory in the

1

Lisa Saltzman is a Professor of History of Art and Director of the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. Her work
considers how loss and grief have operated in the history of visual art and culture, and the role of absence in working with such
content.
2
Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her work is concerned with
cultural memory, testimony and photography. She particularly focuses on the representation of World War Two and the
Holocaust.

3

face of the fact-ness of a photo is strongly connected to my own work. Hirsch is
writing about or around the ownership of memory, and memory’s relationship to fact,
when she talks about what she calls postmemory:
Postmemory most specifically describes the relationship of children of
survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents,
experiences that they “remember” only as the narratives and images with
which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute
memories in their own right. [...] Postmemory is a powerful form of memory
precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not
through recollection but through representation, projection and creation. (9)

I was constructing my own narratives from photographs in my paintings. For
some time this led me to questions concerning fact, authority, and the stories I tell,
professionally and personally. I feel like I picked up a photograph one day and since
then have not stopped responding. Since that first day, I have had to consider the
difference between using a photograph which is familiar, and one which is not
connected to me. I suppose I would first have to define the parameters or criteria for
a photograph that is “mine” and one that is not.
I found some photos in a mall. A friend gave me some photos she found in a
second-hand store, in an album. I have inherited photo albums from my family and
could not identify the people in the photos. Sometimes I would use the photos and
wonder if the people in them would approve. Perhaps the meanings I attach to
photos became the stories. I used the photographs as starting points for my work,
but I think there were times when they defined the contours of the paintings.
4

Sometimes I was figuring out whether my work could transcend the photographic
source. When I was not so successful, it was usually because the photos became a
fact that I could not move past, like the vast blue that contains the continents on a
map.
Landscape photos worked well. The large spaces of sky or water allow for
ambiguity. The structure and points of specificity had to be constructed.
Alternatively, I might choose a photo for the people sitting around a table and what I
thought was going on between them. Once I worked that out on the canvas, I would
fill the space. Looking back, I think sometimes it is more meaningful to just leave
some spaces empty. I think it is tremendously important to understand the subtle
difference between ambiguity and vagueness; between a secret and a mystery.
Much can, and has, been written about what the photograph is. In some
cases, photographs are documentations, fixing image and detail. Walter Benjamin
was concerned with mechanically reproducible images, both photographs and film.
Moving images do not allow the viewer time for contemplation in the same way a
painting does. In film, by the time a person apprehends a single image it has
changed again. The photograph has this relationship to the moving image: a freeze
frame denoting an event that only happened once, but once captured holds the
potential of being reproduced to infinity.

I wanted to open these family photographs

up, through the process of painting. Maybe I was painting a memory, maybe a story
I once heard, or one I made up. I am not sure. I also considered how paintings
might be in conversation with one another. When more than one painting was on a
wall in a room, new narratives cropped up, and shifts in other narratives started to
occur.
5

There is a British painter, named Anthony Green. Years ago, I saw a picture
of a sketch for one of his paintings. The drawing had pieces of paper attached on all
sides, sort of crawling its way to a resolution. He insists that his subjects, which are
primarily his own family and life, are not bound by the edges which de-limit traditional
paintings. So his own works are on irregularly shaped supports. In sort of the same
way, when I am in a room with my paintings I see this remembering activity with the
multiple beginnings, a way of loosening the traditional picture plane of painting. I
think about several paintings in a room. Sometimes the conversation between them
might change the way any of the paintings is read independently. This brings to the
surface other questions about resolving things: paintings, stories, memories. It feels
like I used to have to explain my paintings a lot. I would do this by talking about a
flood in my home town. I spoke about it so much, it seemed that the story of it
drifted away, pared down to just a reason. So I stopped telling it.
Perhaps I should introduce a caveat here. I am investigating some ideas,
some questions, and I am dodging others. Years ago, my painting professor said,
“You’re the one who’s cagy.” I have this image of myself, like I am in the backyard,
in the dirt, excavating some things, burying others. From a certain vantage point all
you see is the upturned soil following me, dirt under my nails. My modus operandi
resists full disclosure.
The memory/photography relationship looms large for me right now. I have
been reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. I heard that he wrote this after his
mother died. He gives some consideration to the stilling that takes place in a
photograph, and as he sees it, the death of the subject that occurs (14). He also

6

separates photography into the photographer or operator, the viewer or spectator
and the person or thing which is photographed--the spectrum. He likes that word I
think. He writes: “this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and
adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of
the dead.” (9) One time when I was looking through my grandmother’s album I
found a photograph of my family at dinner. There was my mom and dad, my
grandmother, my sister and I. This was before my parents divorced. In the photo
we are all looking at the camera and (perhaps) at the operator. There are different
expressions on our faces and as I was looking at the photograph, I thought it
seemed like an interesting portrait of my grandfather.
There is a question which haunts my work: why memory at all? Why do I
mine the place of memory? What we remember, what we forget, these things tell us
about who we are. A little bit anyway. Writer Marcel Proust spent so much of his life
there, in memory. I like to think that he wanted to connect to other people who are
trying to remember, who can recognise in his own struggle the process of
remembering. There is a need, or at least an inclination, to remake an experience in
hindsight, to produce a memory that feels closer to true than what someone else
would tell. Perhaps memory contains a sort of diaspora. In my own experience,
only after leaving my home did I recognise it as a point of origin. Before then, the
circle around Slave Lake was too large for me to see myself as within it, like
discovering the earth was round.

7

Maybe this will not be enough. What enough is, I am not sure. I wonder if
there are expectations about this paper finally surrendering the answer to what the
content is.

Author Susan Sontag writes in her paper “Against Interpretation”: “Real art
has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and
then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art
manageable, comfortable.”
Why would I rather paint around memory than write about it?
This feels clumsy, writing about this process. There is no one authoritative
version or any one way to translate the material practice so that it is naked, just the
bare facts. I am not looking for one anyway. Sometimes I think the act of painting is
like saying “I remember.” Maybe it speaks specifically to a very fragile space
between the memory and the story. Maybe I have said too much. Naming this
space or this reason is crude and vulgar and makes me feel dishonest.

I am thinking about painting Kohkom’s house. Or my backyard. Either way, it
may take more than one painting. There might be a story in there, maybe two or
three, and a dream. I am still resisting full disclosure. Writer Thomas King 3 in his
paper, “How I spent my Summer Vacation: History, Story and the Cant of
Authenticity,” writes:

3

Thomas King is a novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, photographer. He currently teaches English and Theatre studies
at the University of Guelph. His work makes use of narrative devices to consider contemporary Native issues, including the
current role of history within Native cultures in North America.

8

We like our history to be authentic. We like our facts to truthful. We
are suspicious of ambiguity, uneasy with metaphor. We are not concerned
with essential relationships. We want cultural guarantees, solid currencies
that we can take to the bank. (249)

I came this far and I thought about what I could do with this. I think maybe
what I have to offer are stories. They are stories that come from my own past,
though that’s not entirely true. They come from stories I heard: I keep them and
then I gift them. I hesitate. I believe they have a value that is not always
understood.
In a graduate presentation, I spoke about my interest in memories, and in
photographs, how those two speak to one another. Someone in the audience said
she wanted to hear more about the paintings. I have thought about how I could tell
her. I believe I can approach an answer by putting the photograph aside for a bit.
Not completely, not forever. Maybe, as another friend put it, putting the photograph
down allows me to get to the “punctum” of the memory. Punctum, as Barthes puts
it:
[...] designate[s] this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed
instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the
notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are
in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive
points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This
second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call
punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a
9

cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks
me, (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (27)

When I look through the photographs I do not know exactly what I am looking
for other than to say I am looking for the thing in the photo or photos that will stop
me. It is usually not anything personal or sentimental, rather it is emotional. That
person is lying on the grass, parallel with the bottom of the photo. If I pretend I don’t
know the people in this other photo, they actually look creepy. Feet. I am always
looking for feet in photographs. When I decide to put the photographs down I have
only to remember things or situations that hold that same element in my memory.
The search becomes different.
In the absence of photographs this word punctum still has meaning for my
work. It speaks about that thing in memory that stings me. I have not laid out a
clear path, but as I go, there are points that call for my attention. There are parts of
experiences I have marked. I think of a poem by Jane Hirschfield. Part of it reads:
See how all flesh grows back across a wound, with a great
vehemence, more strong than the simple untested surface before. There’s a
name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
As all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honours given out
after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest. (34)
I started to leave the canvas bare. When there were empty spaces in those
paintings, they felt like brevity. When I started to paint, the work was in part
stopping. Just stopping. They felt like an unstoried memory. But in other paintings
when I covered up parts, the feeling was different. I got to a point when I discovered
10

that the process of that painting might have been in part to get at only certain
moments. So I painted over parts. I was holding something back or editing. Like
the difference between saying I do not want to tell you about my content and saying I
want to not tell you about my content.
Now I said I tell stories, and most of them are true. I don’t think it matters. So
when are the stories mine to give away? What parts are given away and what parts
are kept close? I try to be careful not to confuse or conflate the original with the truth
or the fact. Once I give it away it might be lifted and changed, much the way I
change memories into stories, stories into paintings. Like using a teaspoon to dig
dirt. I think sometimes stories can be a form of resistance. In the case of oral
narratives, they can resist being made static, being archived, being a fact and maybe
being irrelevant or dead. How do paintings sit beside this? Perhaps they offer
something different in their thing-ness, which always exists in the present, or in the
lovely complication created with the alchemy of paint -- as my supervisor, Ben
Reeves, said, “the empathy with the artist’s hand”.
Author Jonah Lehrer, in his book Proust was a Neuroscientist, wrote about
the science around memory, describing something called reconsolidation: “The
memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what
you remember and more about you. So the purely objective memory ... is the one
memory you will never know.” (85)
I was at a meeting once which left me very upset. When I told my friend what
happened, he was also upset by the events. But somehow I think I was afraid of the
reaction, the emotion. When I started to rationalize what happened, minimizing it, he
said, “Well, you aren’t lying, are you?” I could not be so sure. There were so many
11

of us in the room. Could we all have shared the same event, the same account? No
one else seemed upset at the meeting. The alternative I was given was that I was
lying.

Saying “I remember” can be a bit of an invocation. It is different than saying
“this is what happened”. “I remember” is about some memory being held. It is like a
physical action. You sound like you’re keeping busy anyway.

When my best friend was seventeen (I did not even know her then), her
mother died of cancer. Years later her granny died. She remembers feeling anxiety,
she was afraid she would forget all the things about her granny or her mother. When
she is telling me this, for a while I begin to confuse which loss she is talking about.
But she talked about a blanket that smelled like her granny. She put the blanket in a
bag to try to hold on to that for a while. I would be willing to believe there are a lot of
blankets and pillows and shirts in bags for just that reason. I know of two more such
items.
In his Berlin Chronicles, Walter Benjamin wrote “memory is not an instrument
for exploring the past but its theatre." (611) Benjamin was trying to write about the
city of his birth, and his own childhood. This endeavour is something he struggled
with for a while. He resisted a chronological telling and instead framed his memories
in vignettes of the city. I heard he tried several times to structure his own history in
different ways: people who influenced him, buildings and neighbourhoods he knew.
Proust is another writer concerned with his own memories and how to chronicle
them. Comparatively, Benjamin chose brevity. Proust would recall all the details of
12

a single, seemingly innocuous experience, yet other descriptions were sliding and
liquid. Proust understood that our memories were really more about us than the
thing remembered. Perhaps it is not so much about our memories, but how we
position them, how we connect them and string them together, almost like
scaffolding, how we create the theatre around them.

I might tell a story. I might leave bits out. I might make up some parts. This
is where it gets tricky. I am eager to please and if there is a request for the truth, the
facts, it is difficult not to oblige. But I will resist, and you should resist asking.

British painter Howard Hodgkin says he has never painted an abstract
painting in his life. He paints as he calls them, “emotional situations.” Sometimes I
can see his subject or what he is getting at more clearly than at others. Sometimes
his evocative titles (Haven’t we Met?, After Dinner, or Counting the Days, to name a
few) are what give away his subject. His titles often suggest a memory or a past,
sometimes a melancholy (well isn’t that the memory feeling?). He does not make
sketches or drawings, nor does he use images as references. At times his paintings
are less literal, but he makes clear, not abstract. His paintings are decidedly objects;
he paints on wood small thick pieces that remind me of cupboard doors.

13

(Below: Howard Hodgkin’s Learning About Russian Music 1999 oil on panel,
private collection.)

Degas, like Bonnard, used images as visual references, sometimes the same
one over and over again, tracing and repeating, the image taking on a slightly
different pose each time. I can also understand that; the searching for, and the
haunting of, a situation, a person, a subject. Emmylou Harris sings this line,
“addiction stays on tight like a glove.” She uses it in two different songs 4 . And you
cannot tell the same story twice anyway. I told a lovely story at a party. It was about
my friend. I said, “She came to my house in a wedding dress.” Guests at the party

4

Emmylou Harris, “Deeper Well,” “Where Will I Be,” Wrecking Ball, Asylum Records, 1995

14

laughed and said, “Is that really what happened?” I said no. But it makes a beautiful
story, and besides, a wedding dress was involved.
I don’t know what else to say. It’s like I can’t get my own head clear.

The photograph

Memory

Painting

Stories

This is such an uncomfortable process. The ideas show up, only peripherally,
then just as I try to pin them down to text, they slip away again. So I will try
repeating myself.

Louise Bourgeois works with ideas of memories and her own past. In the
movie The Spider the Mistress and the Tangerine, someone close to her said that
she could make her memories into something that would not be destroyed. Maybe
this is where I come back to fetishizing, something to stand in for my memory so it
will not be forgotten, will not disappear. An exercise in futility, perhaps. The anxiety
around forgetting is a feeling that our own sense of who we are, our place of origin is
being threatened. This perhaps suggests why this work, this research resonates so

15

strongly with so many people. Maybe we can become tangled up in all these stories
and memories which become histories. Perhaps we need a way for all the different
stories to stand, and have integrity beside all the others.
I cannot help but think that one person’s trauma may be another person’s
barely-an-experience. What I mean is that perhaps Hirsch’s idea of inherited
memory may not be exclusive to trauma, and then maybe memory falls dangerously
(or beautifully) close to story-telling. Well, this is not a new idea.
Thomas King talks about the ephemeral qualities of oral narrative tradition. It
cannot be documented textually in the same way. A story told to you, performed for
you, dances and changes and is a living thing. It cannot be pinned down but it also
cannot be easily destroyed. I think painting is a bit like an anchor. It is heavy with
tradition but if I am working with something as ephemeral and cagy as a memory,
then perhaps an anchor is not so bad.

But first there was a flood. Everyone in my town tells this story. I was in
grade five or six. We watched outside, and paced in the kitchen. The water filled
the street and a man in jeans and a plaid shirt lost his hat with the wind, into the
running water. He was on his way home I suppose. I do not know why we did not
drive to somewhere higher. Maybe my mom did not have her car. I don’t remember.
It quickly became too late. We stood on the cement front step and I could feel it
unsteady underneath me, almost floating. We watched as Rose came toward us.
She was small and blonde and drove a red Mazda Miata. No, she swam. She came
out of her car and waved her arms, the water around her collarbone. She came to
help us. That was when I knew we needed help. I started to feel afraid.
16

Barthes talks about the photograph and death. Memory is also connected to
death. Now that the experience exists only in memory, the resurrection is a drama
that plays itself out. Benjamin writes about the drama of memory. He was trying to
write about his own childhood in the Berlin Chronicles. He couldn’t do it
chronologically.
I am starting to understand something more now, the forgetting is part of the
remembering. Believing something might somehow exist even though it is hidden,
buried, or submerged is an act of faith. The forgetting is the necessary part for the
feeling of remembering to be so poignant, like fingers in your hair.
Walter Benjamin was concerned about mechanical reproduction and what
that would do to the aura of an image. When he writes of auras I think about things
having their own specific history. Even more: What does a record or containment of
that history look like?
Marlene Dumas is a painter from South Africa. Someone told me that Dumas
works with reduction, applying paint and rubbing or scraping it off, applying more
paint, and repeating this editing process. She writes: “[...] and if you’re not prepared
for a never-ending answer, don’t ask me no questions.“ I think Benjamin worried
about the auras. While Benjamin worries himself about auras, I make these things,
these paintings, which have their own history which is evident in the mark I make on
the canvas. And this is close to answering “why painting?” What a question!

What are missing here are the stories.

17

I told my friend about my research around memory. She told me: “Your sister
remembers things differently. What you see is not what your sister sees.” She
never met my sister. She wanted to tell me a thing or two about memory. She was
talking about my research. She started out by telling me she had the weirdest
dream. So she was telling me about her dream, but her family too. Her father left
her mother when she was very young. He tried to see his daughter, but her mother
punished him. “It was my punishment. We were always moving.” She was talking
to me about my research. She told me stories about her father and her mother and
the other woman, a two-bit Canadian. Her brothers and sister, both the living and
the dead. She told me about fortune tellers, and the TV show Coronation Street.
Sometimes it feels like people want to tell me stories. Sometimes it feels like they
can’t get them out fast enough. She was telling me about standing at her father’s
grave, and just when I thought she had forgotten her thread, there it is: “...But the
memories are nothing compared to my brothers’ and sister’s..” Well, that’s what
happens when I talk about my work: people tell me their stories.
Thomas King writes, “I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to
suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never
been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will always be chained to
these stories as long as I live” (The Truth About Stories 9). What I have learned
about addiction is how it operates to numb and to silence. When stories start to
surface in these unexpected places it is surprising. What you can discover, among
other things, is that there was empty space that the story now occupies.

18

So I have been thinking about a painting I want to do. This one is about my
backyard in Slave Lake; the trees and the highway beyond my fence. From my
bedroom window I used to look out through the layer of ice on the window. I listened
to the trucks going past (there is a truck stop just up the highway). I would imagine
where they were going. I listened to the diesel trucks in the alley running all night in
the winter. They belonged to the neighbours who either worked on the rigs or were
truckers themselves.

Roland Barthes writes: “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated
objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the
windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object:
dualities we can conceive but not perceive…” (Camera Lucida 6). It is the space
between object and desire, photograph and memory, that interests me. So I have
this idea of what that backyard was like. But there are parts I couldn’t catch in a
photograph. Or in a painting. But the desire to catch it is enough. Lately there have
been these blank spaces in my paintings. My work has created different struggles
for me. These are the gaps, not necessarily in my memory but in my ability to
articulate something, like a note on desire.
Why the bare canvas? What changes? What is the relationship with
drawing? Hodgkin would say, I think, that he draws. The drawing is present in the
strands of colour and paint, the composition. That seems bolder than my own
notions of how drawing operates in my work. I need a tentative erasability that gives
me an out and an exit point and an entry point. A pencil mark can do this while at
the same time, it seems to compel me to define. It could make anything possible.
19

I am trying to write about my resistance. This part keeps getting erased and
rewritten. I want to say something about how it is not always resistance, but desire.
That feeling of desire is close to the feeling of remembering. To maintain the feeling
of desire, to point to it, I must resist satisfying it. I won’t tell you everything I can. I
am trying to track down a memory. Get my hand to remember. As soon as a mark
is made it changes what I see in my mind; kind of changes my memory. I am
creating the images from nothing, and though I am even more aware of the
construction of the image, it still does not fail to affect my memory. It is all there is.
As I said, I needed to set the photographs down in order to find out what they
meant to me. When I started to put the photograph down, I became stuck. I was
paralyzed and afraid to put the paint on the canvas. I started to draw on the canvas
lightly with a pencil. I started with an image, or a memory. I was, in a way, thinking
like a camera. I thought about what moment I would freeze, where the viewpoint
should be from. I became tethered to the story of it, the memory. When I started
with an image the process got lost. I would not allow the alchemy of the paint to tell
its part. I decided, unconsciously that I would tell each memory once, and I would
do it correctly, just the right way. Only afterward did I see that the very process I
was stifling is so important. It is remembering; the process is all there is.
It seems like the part of addiction which is so powerful is the absence of the
thing desired. To quell that desire an addict will go to dangerous places. Yet the
very thing the addict craves eventually numbs. The satisfaction of the desire is
where a person can stop feeling anything at all. Once you are addicted, you do not
cure it, you manage it. The addiction is not in the drug, it is in the desire. That stays
with you.
20

When I think of the addicts and recovering addicts I know I sometimes
imagine all the memories and images that they carry in their brains, all the places
they have taken themselves and where it stays evident on their bodies. Yet the
moment of satiating the addiction is a place people have fantasies about erasing
from their own physical landscape. This moment is usually not even enough of a
moment to tell about. Important enough to keep secret. The need to keep it secret,
unspoken, untraceable is the very thing that magnifies it. The story I heard about my
birth, maybe it is on my own landscape. If it is, it is not important to me to sort out all
the nuances and ways that it is and is not connected. I would rather let it be tangled
up. Or make up an interesting reason of my own.
I am afraid to write about authorship. People who make things sometimes
recycle imagery, recycle brushstrokes or colour palettes. When I think of Hodgkin, I
think of wide brushstrokes, frames and wood. When I think of Bonnard I think of
small dappling bits of paint and that woman who is forever bathing. This is how we
know these painters. There is something of an authorship in that. They tell that
particular story or tell it that particular way. And they can steal things too, take
someone else’s story and refashion it. But as Benjamin says, there is the object with
the history and we are given space and time to apprehend it.

21

(Below, Pierre Bonnard’s Le Bain, 1925 oil on canvas, 86x120cm Tate Britain,
London)

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions

(Below Pierre Bonnard’s Nu à la baignoire. 1936. Oil on canvas, 93X147cm.
Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.)

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions

22

(Below, Pierre Bonnard’s Nu dans le bain au petit chien 1941-46. Oil on
canvas, 123X152cm. Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.)

What was on my mind in the days to follow the flood is how this had
happened to our town before and that the last time, they all moved. This time, my
sister and I stayed in the hotel while my mom went to the house to see the damage,
to salvage what she could. When we did go back I went into the basement, where it
had been filled with water. I tried to imagine it. The only trace was a ring around the
wall that the water had left behind. I was surprised how quickly the “I survived the
Slave Lake Flood” T-shirts came out.

For my internship last summer, I worked with Emily Carr University’s Vice
President Academic, Monique Fouquet, who piloted the first year of the Summer
23

Institute for Aboriginal Teens. She took me on board with her to teach the program.
It was a risk for her. I had been difficult to work with when I first arrived in
Vancouver. Fear, I imagine. So I was teaching teenagers. Monique has a sense of
humour. This was, as she suggested, a cathartic experience. I had to negotiate
between being a student and a teacher. I thought about authority and agency, and
how to communicate. There was a particular student of mine. She was sharp, and
therefore a challenge. I think along the way we are all told stories about who we are
or where we come from. She might have said, “The stories I was told about who I
am are true, how could I also be something else?” She asked me why she should
even try. I tried to tell her that I think she could only get to another place by telling
another story. I hope I asked her to author a few. If I enjoyed success in this
summer position it was when a student accused me of answering questions with
more questions.

My aunt and my uncle were involved in this court case. It became known,
reported about in papers and even on a television show. There were protests and
death threats, and my uncle died. The court case still goes on though. My aunt is
still involved. I am sure there will be more media reports and I guess it will be part of
a legal or political history somewhere. I sometimes felt a little foolish. Maybe I still
do. I don’t think I ever understood the whole thing, it was complicated. I should
know more, I should take a stand, a political or legal stand (something with
acronyms likely). But what I experienced so far, and what I know about it are
comparatively ridiculous details. I remember the big kitchen table and a glass of
cold dry white wine with tortilla chips and hot salsa. I remember going to Slave Lake
24

from Edmonton with my aunt, forest fires making everything past Westlock a pink
haze. I remember Sunil bringing us food from the Truck stop to the office. I was still
in junior high school, so I don’t remember if my sister testified in Ottawa, but when
we went, my mom got us new clothes.

Perhaps an aura suggests an original and single history but also limits the
possibility of a future or the thing having a life beyond. Perhaps there are several
originals, all created in the moment, like oral narratives. But then if there is an aura,
a single history of a place, a thing, a person, I would like to believe that it has an
inherent value. More so, I would like to think both of these things are possible.
Thomas King, in his work The Truth About Stories, finishes several anecdotes in a
similar way. In one version King ends by saying,
Take Louis’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will.
Cry over it. Get angry. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you
would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.
You’ve heard it now. (119)
Benjamin was talking about mechanical reproduction: a perfect copy that
could be reproduced to infinity. But what if someone played a trick on him? What if
the thing being copied shifted just a little, like the game of looking at two images and
finding all the differences? In one version King ends by saying,
Take Charm’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will.
Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the
years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had
heard this story.
25

You’ve heard it now. (29)

I was on my way to the airport in Edmonton. I looked out the truck window at
the frozen outside. I quite like the familiar snow and ice. It was silent and purple
because the sun was going down, and the snow was glowing. I remembered
Kohkom’s house. It was empty and abandoned. My cousin Naomi took me there: “I
wanna show you something.” We wandered through the bush on the reserve and
this house showed up. I had until then imagined that her house was brown, and
maybe dark green. What she took me to was a small whitish cube. Inside it was
bright and sunbleached. There was a kitchen chair. There was a light blue or
turquoise plastic cup and saucer. It seems like there were patterns like flowers.
“You mean they used to live here before they died? Are we allowed to be here?” I
was pretty sure we weren’t. But it was as though the daily activity of the house had
just been stilled one day.

There is this story my mom told me. My kohkom and mosum went berry
picking. I imagine them in a big, old Chevy truck (three on the tree). My mom
corrects me: They never had a vehicle, it was horse and wagon, more difficult for
me to picture. They are in the bush for a while, mosum and kohkom wandering to
different parts. When they get back in the truck he says something to his wife. She
is irritated and says, “Oh, you’re talking to me now. The whole time I was out there
talking to you and you wouldn’t answer me.” He tells her he wasn’t near her. She
argues, “I saw you behind me.” My kohkom was legally blind since she was a young
girl. My mom laughs when she tells me this. It must have been a bear. I love this
26

story, but I think it only works if we believe that it was, in fact, a bear. And we only
have the account of a blind woman to trust for it.

I was talking to a friend about a play she is writing. She is doing work about
memory too. She was struggling at first with how to thread all the vignettes she
created, she transcribed, into a larger body of work. I think we have that in common.
I am looking at a draft of this paper and I see an instructor’s pen points all though the
pages. I take heart when I think of Proust. He wrote and rewrote, in fact never
seeing the process finish in his own life. As Lehrer writes it, we always inform our
memories with what we know now, so the process is infinite, it is all there is.
When I was painting from photographs I wonder if at first I was using them as
proof. Proof for what I am not certain. Perhaps that something was anchored in
document or fact. Though I suppose the photograph is a poor substitute for a fact.
When I set the photos aside (but never completely, they still sort of haunt me, which
I am glad of), the first thing is that the picture plane as I understood it, began to
change or fall away. I noticed how much I couldn’t account for and that started to
become important to me. On the simplest level, what is there gets heightened in
importance by the space around it. But I like to think that the space maybe carries
its own value, or substance. I wonder how the space might be a punctum. Like a
mouth hanging open in disbelief.

Before the flood, there were warnings. My sister, my mom, and I went into
the basement and piled our boarder, Rose’s, clothing on top of her dresser.
Thinking back it was only a gesture: The water poured in through the windows and
27

climbed up the walls. All that happened after we left. When my mom describes it,
her eyes get big and her hands stand in for the rising water. She holds her hands
flat, palm down, moving up, above her waist. What I remember was when the
garbage truck came. I imagined escaping much differently. I looked at my mom
incredulously, like she was making a joke. I walked down the back steps lowering
myself into the cold, brown water. That was about when I understood: I was going
to go through a garbage shoot.

28

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Hodgkin, Howard, and Kenneth Baker. “‘I’ve Never Painting an Abstract Picture in
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Minh-ha, Trinh T.. “Grandma’s Story.” Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings
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Saltzman, Lisa. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in
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---. “Against Interpretation” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
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The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine. Dir. Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach.
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Sussman, Paul. Taste 4 Chaos: Autobiographic Journals of an Uncommon Speed
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Appendix A

“Installation view” Brenda Draney 2008.

31

“Installation view” Brenda Draney 2008.

32

Appendix B
Media Documention: CD containing visual work in support of thesis

33