My 88-year old mother moved into a nursing home in Sept.  She had reached the point of needing 24-hour care both physically and mentally.  As her eldest child and only daughter, I was left to make the decision and it was a tortuous one.  I felt that I should care for her at home even though I knew that trying to do so would break me quite quickly.

Recently, cleaning out her home in preparation for selling it, I found a cache of old documents - birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, military records, etc.  I had needed to put my struggles into some cathartic exercise, and suddenly it dawned on me what I wanted to do.  I have scanned these old documents and cut glyphs from them to form a family of fonts.  I’ve then used these fonts, along with other algorithmic elements, to create Measure of a Life.

As I think about the lives of my closest family members, all sorts of words and emotions come to mind, from the exquisite closeness I felt with my father to the yawning chasm of my brother's dysfunction, to my mother's loss of body autonomy and dignity. I'm sure my family differs in many particulars from others and yet is a microcosm of all families everywhere. If you look at the outputs closely, some of my family joys and sorrows are written in plain text, while the same words, written in fragments of documents turn the whole into a visual tapestry felt rather than read.

It seems only yesterday that I ran wild on the farm, my parents and grandparents a forcefield of security, and death something too abstract and distant to have any meaning.  Now I stand at the apex of my family, the bridge between the generations ranging behind me and those stretching before me, my great-granddaughter now the feral child.  How does one measure a life - a few documents, a few photos, a plot in the cemetery, a great pang in the heart?

Love and creativity always,

Wanda