Mary McIntyre

For Alice

A supine female figure of woven steel wire is suspended above a turbulent cyanotype ‘river’. A partially gilded driftwood form floats within the figure. For Alice takes my family history as the starting point for a meditation on broken relations. Reclaiming two lost family members, I’m also re-shaping my family’s connection to a particular place – Wonscotonach, known post-settlement as the Don River. The story of my great-aunt Alice as told by her younger sister – my grandmother – was a warning about choosing the wrong man. Though I never met them, Alice and her child are still my family. Reclaiming them repairs the broken connection between our family’s past and present, at the river’s edge. Alice is a vessel, in the sense that Ursula Le Guin envisaged – an embodied narrative, ghostly but resilient. She and her child – my cousin – float above a cyanotype river that evokes the Don that witnessed her husband’s punishment, but also the river of memory and family that bears them up. They are suspended in another plane of existence, the child on the brink of becoming, watching over their family through the decades.

“For Alice connects my family’s history and present, and is also infused with the spirit of the place where I collected its materials – the earth, water, branches and leaves with which I made the cyanotype print, the driftwood that became the child form – as well as the family story that is its text. For Alice represents my process of recovering connections between my personal history and the history of my family on this territory, and between the human and the natural worlds that share this place.”