CROSSLEY GALLERY

Like a Fish

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Opening Friday, September 4th at Crossley Gallery, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.

Artist's Exhibition Talk with photographer and faculty member Noelle McCleaf on Tuesday, September 15, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Crossley Gallery. 

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Like a Fish references a poem written by my mother, found two years after her death--an earthly meditation on her transcendental reincarnation into a fish. Photographs from a fifteen-year archive of collaboration between mother and daughter made in South Florida are reexamined and reevaluated, reflecting on the transient nature of life and the photograph’s inherent ability to crystalize and preserve fragments of time. Family photographs dating back to the 1950s and poems from my mother’s archive act as connective tissue for three generations of matriarchs, traversing the coastlines of Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. A fisher-woman who learned the ways of the sea from her mother, my mother was most content with a fishing pole in hand, wading waist-deep in blue-green water, watching the horizon. To catch, clean, and cook fish on the same day is no easy feat, and a ritual that I found both wondrously grotesque and miraculous, a metaphor for the shortness of life and its precarity. A decade before my mother’s passing, I read William Faulkner’s tragic and poignant novel As I Lay Dying. One page stood out to me that never left my consciousness: My Mother is a Fish.

Five words on a single page, as a child attempts to rationalize a mother’s death, fording a coffin through a flood. Before she died, my mother’s lungs filled with water. Thunder broke with great rain as she left the Earth, before hurricane Milton made landfall. A year later, following her wishes, I returned her to the Gulf of Mexico. Through photographs, time travel is possible, offering referential reminders of what has been, and through poetry, imagining infinite possibilities into what could be.

Noelle McCleaf