ARTWORK
Project: My Mother’s Legacy
My Mother’s Legacy, 1995
1,000 line poem burned onto 1,000 found wooden bowls
Size varies for each piece; installed size variable
"When my mother died of breast cancer, she was 47 and I was 13. When my mother died everything stopped. All my thoughts were sad ones. So I started to keep the good things I remembered on scraps of paper in an old box under my bed. I would read them when I was sad. Over the years, I carried around so many memory fragments that I could not fit together to fully understand who my mother had been as a person. In 1995 during an artist residency at MacDowell in Peterborough, NH I began to write all the things I could remember. Out of that list came these lines that are My Mother's Legacy.
On each bowl is written a line from my memory that reflects a mannerism, advice, or a remark I attribute to my mother. The bowls are piled randomly onto tables, where the viewer must pick up each bowl to read it. The act of lifting each bowl reminds me of my mother, because she had the habit of turning things over to see where they were made.”
— Sarah Hutt
Since 1995, the complete installation of My Mother's Legacy has been part of more than 20 solo two-person and group exhibitions devoted to storytelling and remembrance across the United States in venues including the Clews Center for the Arts, Denver, CO; The University of New Mexico, Las Cruces, NM; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; Emmanuel College, Boston, MA; Elliott Bay Art, Seattle, WA; and most recently the James Library and Art Center, Norwell, MA. It has received extensive press coverage in publications such as the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The Seattle Times as well as interviews and podcasts.
In 1998 Hutt self-published a book, My Mother's Legacy, to accompany the exhibition of this work, followed by a second printing in 2003.