‘Standing Stones, Remembering’

I am writing this walking on Easter Day, with pencil in hand, to see what happens. The sunlight filters through the trees… I look back to when the children were young, how long and drawn out the weekends were. As a mother, those early days were lonely, the challenge of our repeated separations; but as an artist, it has been also freeing, channelling these feelings, finding a way to hold the moving parts of life together. The children have been at the centre: my relationship to origins, to something profoundly solitary, and to absolute joy. They are teachers of a different kind, holding up a mirror to the deepest intricacies of who I am, and to who I will become. Now as they move into their own lives in their mid-twenties, I am embarking on a profound landscape of change.

Mother and Child, 2023
Ink on Shuen paper

As I write this, walking amongst the trees, I see everything clearly—see the past transforming. This period of transition waits in the wings for every woman who is a mother.

My family moved from the United States to the UK in August 1976. A young child at the time, I felt lost and displaced, a sense of being uprooted. Over the years I have seen the impact this has had on all our lives. That and my own mother’s sadness at leaving home, the complex feelings she had around this closing of doors. Our memories and the search for them helped define me and the work I do as an artist. 

Last week, I returned to childhood memory through the arrival of a packet of documents that mapped the land belonging to our grandfather, who at one time owned much of the parkland across the Garrison region of the Hudson River in New York. We spent summers there growing up, taking the trail to Castle Rock. Their house was designed by the architect Charles Haight in 1892, commissioned by our great-grandfather William Church Osborn, at one time president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Children’s Aid Society. The views were beautiful stretching out across the river. In Central Park, there are gates decorated with imagery from Aesop’s Fables, in memory of him and his philanthropy. My grandparents’ home was full of my grandmother’s earth-centred sculptures.

As I think about my mother and the particular challenges she’s presently facing in her life, a compassion is born that I’ve never encountered before. At this moment, in the place where my walk has taken me, there’s a stone marked ‘Edith sings’, and beneath the inscribed date 1938 ‘in the field of rain’. As I continue down the path, I notice the words, metaphors or memories, on many of these headstones and write them down:  

Always in our thoughts, a devoted mother, courageous, kind and loving, sacred to the memory, free from everlasting suffering; abide with me. Life’s home well run, life‘s work well done, mother from our happy home and circle; she does her work well in this world. Loved by me, she still lives in the hearts of those who loved her.

I pass a sycamore that rises from the earth, buckled under its own weight, crusted with age-old bark, reaching for the sun. Known to connect heaven, earth and the underworld, its sacred umbrella stands witness to history and to all those who have passed through here.  

See what happens I intone as I walk past fallen stones and broken slabs, ruptured spaces in the earth. To the right lies a church with stained glass and another engraved monument, this time faded to invisibility. On this short day, with its fragments of fractured light, by this means of seeing, thoughts of motherhood drift to the forefront and I learn more ways than ever of remembering.

I am lost now here in the age-old cemetery. An older man with white hair, walking stick and a crumpled raincoat passes slowly and when asked says the exit is beside the white house. He looks pleased, smiles, stops and pauses. He then adds that he is here to visit his late mother. I find the white house and the large wrought-iron gates. I look back. We wave. A stone stands crooked in the grass. Their name liveth forever. I think about my own family’s generations and all those who came to rest in this place. 

This is only the beginning and the course of this day is yet to show itself. When I set out to write this, I planned something of a more certain kind but I’ve learned to let things unfold. I have lived near here for twenty-three years and am soon to move on from the place where I have raised both my children.

 March 31st, 2024

Text and images by Whitney McVeigh, an American visual artist, best known for her paintings and installations.  Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Her paintings are preoccupied with the complexity and dual layers of the body, exploring languages with origins in Eastern and Western philosophy.