Weekend Portfolio: Tealia Ellis Ritter
Images and Text by Tealia Ellis Ritter
My mother broke her collarbone twice in her youth. For years she experienced pain in her chest and shoulder. While visiting an alternative healer in Hawaii, she was informed that an ancestor of hers, had his chest smashed in a dramatic accident. The healer explained that the pain was not just her own but a cellular memory contained in her genetic code of the accident experienced by her deceased relative. He told her that our cells carry the lives and memories of generations and that these memories, while not consciously accessible, are still active and imprinted on our beings, causing us to feel and behave in ways we may not fully comprehend. After leaving the healing session, she later remembered and confirmed, a story her mother told her while growing up, about a terrible mining accident, in which her grandfather was thrown from the mine car, crushing his chest. My mother married my father when she was 20 years old. He was a mining engineer.
Thirty years later, I spread my father’s ashes on the 360 acre farm he lived on prior to his death. The motion of my hand, throwing his body, lives in me. The change to the color of the ground imprinted. Flowers For Oscar, pivots around the act of throwing. Interest in the land where the ashes were spread and a repetitive performative meditation on the act of throwing is explored in relation to the transformative power of the photographic negative and the connection between body and land. Each image takes on these ideas in a unique way. The transformation could be simply showing something in grayscale, grounded in context or potentially complex and reliant on the chance action of throwing or spreading materials onto film prior to printing, creating vivid color shifts on the surface of the negative and echoing the mark making act. Through this process the images exist as autonomous yet linked traces, connecting the motion of the body to the land and to memory.
More of Tealia Ellis Ritter’s work can be found on her website.
