Under The Wings of Artemis

PAGE

98 - 99

In the image depicted here, the young Zebrowski is standing attentively by her grandmother, who sits in a field making flower crowns. The tender connection between them is palpable. The viewer can sense their mutual awareness of one another by their close proximity: the intermingling of the child’s leg with her grandmother’s skirt and the young girl’s watchful gaze as her grandmother’s hands fashion a crown. The grandmother demonstrates her bond with the child indirectly by assuming the role of kindly teacher passing on her knowledge about things floral. As the adult Zebrowski writes, “I wondered how she knew what to do, who had shown her? I wore my crowns proudly, my summer reign too brief.”

With the Persephone myth in mind, it takes only a small imaginative leap to envision ourselves looking out on the Nysian plain – the site of Persephone’s abduction while picking flowers – and seeing this child as a personification of a younger Persephone on one of her earlier visits to the field. But a photograph can capture only one solitary moment in time. Will the child soon bound through the field ahead of her grandmother? Will they feel joy, faint sorrow or, like Demeter’s emotions at the loss of Persephone, anguish when they part? The non-prescient photograph locks the answers away.

Persefóneia
Maro Vandorou

The cultural differences that divided Yale and her Korean-born mother were vast. Her mother’s ideas on behavior, beauty, and gender were shaped by her upbringing during and after the Korean War and were borne out, in dramatic fashion, in her approach to childrearing. Throughout the book are quotes such as “this is why i get sick, because of stress from you,” “your sister was never like this,” and “no one loves you more than i do.”

In this page spread, two bulging, globular yellow shapes overlay a screen of Korean characters translated into English, which suggest the cultural divide between mother and daughter. Within the forms are the comments “when are you going to learn?” and “i thought you were so smart.” Floating between the two are the words “i didn’t raise you to be like this.” The shapes appear to be bound or stitched into tightly compacted, bursting-at-the-seams packages – figuratively, perhaps, the bundles of fear that the young Yale might have felt at this barrage of criticism.

Recalling the myth of Persephone, we know that although Demeter is a devoted and loving mother to her daughter, she certainly had rage within her. Demeter’s fierce wrath was directed against the land by withholding crops. Sadly, the mother depicted in Yale’s account directed her frustration by withholding approval.

As the only daughter of Polish immigrants, Ewa Monika Zebrowski has made the themes of memory and displacement central to her art. My Mother, Myself is a do-si-do (or dos à dos, from the French, meaning back-to-back) accordion book: two separate books, one titled My Mother, the other Myself, facing in opposite directions, are bound together, with the last page of each glued to museum board that serves as back cover for both books. The images, which are accompanied by written memories of the artist’s childhood, are reproductions of original photographs of the artist with her mother, grandmother, and other family members and friends. Together they convey nostalgia for past moments of a life.

My Mother, Myself
Ewa Monika Zebrowski