Mother Tongue/ Lengua Madre, 1991

I produced Mother Tongue 30 years ago (!), towards the end of my MFA at Concordia University. At the time my friend KF and I had created a dark room out of a closet in the Bourgeois building. Under strange administrative reasons during those years, being part of an open graduate program that had no link to an undergraduate one, left us unable to use the darkroom in the VA building, or any other shop for that matter. So, we made our own.

In retrospect it probably was very toxic, and I don’t remember if we used masks, on top I started using ‘liquid light’ on lead, doubling the toxic possibilities probably! KF reminded me a while ago that my experience working in the photo lab at OCAD in Toronto came in handy. I knew what to buy and to how to mix the chemicals for developing and printing black and white.
Mother Tongue is made out of a series of approx. 20 lead panels seven by five inches and about ¼ of an inch thick. As I mentioned, I used liquid light (a chemical that makes any surface light sensitive) to develop black and white photographic images on top of the lead. These panels would sit on wooden ledges; the configuration would vary depending on where it was installed.

The images in the lead pieces are of my face with the eyes close, of my face with the eyes open, of my tongue and of my thumbprint: all elements to confirm identity. The photographic images sat very unevenly on the surface of the lead creating differences with each image.

This work was exhibited at Articule, in Montreal in a group show where three curators had chosen three artists of the community. It travelled to AKA’Artist Centre in Saskatoon as part of a show I had titled ‘Heavy Stitching’, and my friend DB took the work to Mexico along side other works from Montreal artists. Somehow some of the pieces have been ‘lost’, I don’t know how that happened, but I was neglectful to check that they were all there every time the work came back from its travels.

I am particularly found of the work as I think it is one of the strongest works where I combined my feelings of exile tied to my identity as an artist and a woman.