The Impossible Speech Act

Archival Injet Prints
2007

A possible solution for my fear of the void that death created and my preoccupation with mourning was to preserve what I could of my relationship with my mother, to make it into something tangible, something permanent.  In my search for this tangibility I thought of the concept of the death mask; a sculptural object that acts as a substitution, fixing an image in place. By involving my mother in this process, I thought of it as a way to outlast the inevitable, this is also illustrated by Brault and Naas who state that, “Citing the other speaking of death – allows the dead a sort of survivance – a kind of living on- before their actual death – as if they had found a way not simply to utter some prophetic intimation of their own death but to enact the impossible speech act […].”

Documentation by Daniel Ehrenworth