Perpetual Care

About Perpetual Care

In keeping with the Victorian view of cemeteries as a place of art and reflection, the lush vistas and historic monuments of one of the country’s oldest landscaped cemeteries serves as backdrop for a series of photographed installations that open conversation on chronic illness. Bottles of medications and supplements play chess on the tiles of the Receiving Tomb, or troop down the center of the road in spring and across a frozen Lake Hibiscus in winter. All photographs were taken in Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery with generous permission of the Forest Hills Educational Trust.

Perpetual Care is available both as a gallery exhibit of twenty framed photographs accompanied by a cycle of poems, and as a performance/lecture combining slides with a poetry reading. The poems give language to the unspoken conversations that hover beneath the spoken ones, as a person encounters illness and maneuvers through systems of care.

Past exhibitions:

Marran Gallery, Lesley University, Cambridge, MA

Newton Free Library Gallery, Newton, MA

Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Boston, MA

Boston Public Library, West End Branch, Boston, MA

One photograph is included in a traveling exhibit of Visual Aid in San Francisco, California.

Perpetual Care has received grant support from the Puffin Foundation.