The first big challenge was to do specific research on the Gurs camp, on the details of my mother’s internment there, and on the physical environment in that area of France. At Brandeis, I proposed that the writing and environment tell the story of integrating the new information about my mother’s war experience into my adult life in Western Massachusetts and my identity. I had been creating environmental installations for several years, and in 2010 began grafting my prose into the sculptural tree forms in these installations. I also wanted to explore the concept of tree to paper to story to grafting and recycling back into the tree. I applied for an art exhibition at the Brandeis WSRC with the proposal that I create an installation to explore the interface of visual and written storytelling, specifically focused on the Holocaust legacy on a woman’s midlife experience. In the following few years I did research on this camp, Gurs, and then, since I am a writer in addition to being a visual artist, I began writing a memoir incorporating the new information. On this trip, I learned something completely unexpected, that my mother had been in an internment camp, also called a concentration camp, in the south of France. I was digging for information about my mother’s experience during the Holocaust since she had told me virtually nothing whenever I asked her where she was during the War. My current installation at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, Embedded Legacies, began with a trip I took to visit relatives in Paris six years ago. Here, Lydia Kann Nettler (Drawing Finalist ’00) discusses her installation Embedded Legacies, currently on view at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in one work of art.
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