We inherit far more from our parents than their DNA. We inherit their shadows too; the longings, inclinations and unfulfilled lives that they carried with them. Carl Jung wrote of psychic inheritance in this way.
The life which the parents could have lived, but of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the children in substitute form. That is to say: the children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents.
When our individual stories are tied too closely to sublimated parental needs, our lives can get hijacked by anxiety, ambivalence and ambiguity—unless and until we reckon with it.
I am the reckoning that my parents would not undergo or claim. I am the repository of stories remembered and misremembered, alternate versions of events and personhood that have changed in their telling, and I am the judge of the veracity of those stories, of what is possibly true versus what is a lie told to keep something buried. I am listening to their pasts told to me by them and others. I am curious about the gaps and I am looking to untangle what was theirs to unravel from what is mine, and where intersections between the two should and should not occur.
These photographs are my early attempts to visualize my mother's shadow self. Some are inextricably tied to culture—my mother immigrated here from the Philippines—while others to her desire to be singular and special, whether through being a favorite grandchild or spiritually "blessed" in being able to see things that most could not. Making these has been a strange curative for things that I hadn't even known ailed me, until I made these pictures.