A Remembrance
The story behind the wind chime
I was putting the final touches on Untitled (A Remembrance), and suddenly, a sea of tears escaped from my eyes. Puffy-faced and red-eyed, I went downstairs to show my sisters. “Have you been crying?” one of them asked. And then it was happening again, I was crying…a lot. They kept asking me what was wrong. “It looks great, Ciarra.” “It’s beautiful, what’s the matter?” But I just didn’t have the words.
Finishing up this piece was a relief and a weight I felt at the same time. I finally understand why artists do not curate shows and include their work. It is too stressful wearing two hats: the artist and the curator. Both require you to use different parts of your brain, self, and spirit. I spent eight months planning “What They Left Us” and spent maybe three weeks making my piece for the show, an artwork I have never made and had no experience making.
I wanted to make something new. This was not only my first time co-curating an exhibition, but it was my first time making a piece specifically for a show. Months prior, I was up for the challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it. But this was before I was accepted into Scout Art Fair and before I started my new job. January turned to June, and there I was, four weeks before our opening, piece-less. The funny thing is, “What They Left Us” was inspired by my 2023 piece, A Thread of Daughters, yet it was not even a work I considered for the show. A Thread of Daughters became a last-minute addition to the show (like on the day of the show) when we were unsure if my windchime would be finished on time. Even with the setbacks, I was determined to make this new artwork, even if it was installed two hours before our opening.
After I finished making this piece and the tears fell endlessly down my cheeks, that is when it hit me…I didn’t even think about how hard summers are for me. As I welcome the hot sun, change of clothes, the activities, and the longer days, it is in the summer that I found out my mom had cancer. It was the summer when my mother, Eileen, transitioned into her next life. The ease and joy that this season brings also carries a shadow, and it is my grief.
Untitled (A Remembrance) is how I worked through this grief this summer. August 2nd marked four years without Eileen’s physical presence. Four years without her voice, her laugh, her advice, her touch, her care, her love. Four years being a daughter without her mother. I feel the weight of her absence, and in this fourth year, I finally have the space to see how this shadow of grief doesn’t just follow me through the summers, but follows my sisters, brother, lola, and my mother’s friends.
Coincidentally, the final day of “What They Left Us” was Saturday, August 2nd. In honor of its closing, Divina and I held a guided tour. In honor of my mother, I invited her friends, and I got to share my love for the work we curated, and my personal story about the two works of mine that were included.
This Artletter shares how Untitled (A Remembrance) came to be, a behind-the-scenes story as you will, and the longgg journey it has taken for me to arrive at this work and this place in my grief.
The question that came to mind when writing this was: ”What is the foundation of your love?”
Mine is Eileen.
With Love,
Ciarra K. Walters
Flashback to Paris 2021:
Sometime in March or April, I had the vision for Untitled (A Remembrance). I was on FaceTime with Divina, and it was our first time discussing what we wanted to contribute to the show. Suddenly, it hit me: I was going to make a capiz shell windchime with pictures of my mom and lola on the shells.
I had a flashback to 2021 when I traveled to Paris a month after my mother’s transition. I was there to perform in front of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped. It was Christo’s last realized work before his death, and traveling to see it came to me in a dream. Even though I was a newly appointed guardian and felt crazy leaving my sisters for five days (who were with our lola during that time btw), I felt it in my soul that I was supposed to go there. (I wrote about this experience in my Artletter, Postcards From Paris.)
On my last day in Paris, I decided to visit La Sainte-Chapelle, a 13th-century church made up of stained glass. My mom was Catholic, loved stained glass, and I thought she would have wanted to see it if she were alive. I took her ashes there and sat in silence in that church on my last day in Paris.
But on my way there, I passed through a plant district. It was a block full of plant shops, and that’s when I heard this noise that stopped me in my tracks. “That sounds like my mother,” I thought.It was a wind chime made of round, white, semi-transparent shells. It looked like a jellyfish. Something about that sound…it reminded me of my mother. I bought it. I envisioned that wind chime hanging from my bedroom window...which was my mom’s old room. I wanted to hear her when I wasn’t thinking about her, when I wasn’t present. And since I hung it up on that day in October, that windchime has done just that. On those beautiful, almost perfect days where I open my windows and the wind breezes on by, I hear my mother.
In March, after my interview with Good Black Art was released, an artist named Zoe Schwartz reached out to me on Instagram. She saw my interview and wanted to talk because she has also been working with eggshells and thinking about
her mother’s lineage. We FaceTimed a few days later, discussing our art practices, and to our surprise, we found out we were both Filipina mixed. She was in her studio, and behind her sat a wall of capiz shells, so I shared my story about Paris. That’s when she said, “You know, capiz shells come from the Philippines, right??”
After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about those irridescent shells and their connection to my mother and my life.
The-Window/Windchime-Disaster/Destiny:
Even though all the signs pointed to me making a wind chime, I ignored them. When I began researching them, I couldn’t figure out how I would make my wind chime an original sculpture instead of a generic wind chime. I decided that that art piece needed time to unravel, and without a second thought, I abandoned it. As I researched the capiz shell windchimes, I discovered another use for those shells in the Philippines: glass for windows. I fell in love with these windows and knew this was what I wanted to make for the show. I envisioned using phototransfer on 35 square-cut capiz shells, with a stained oak wood frame. I would use one photograph from my mom's or lola’s archive and break that photo up into 35 squares, creating a grid. It took one YouTube Short to convince me. I was making a window. (I should have known that a YouTube Short is NOT a reliable source to develop this new skill in woodwork —especially 3.5 weeks before the exhibition).
In those weeks, I spent multiple days at Home Depot. In and out of that store, I was constantly discovering new tools or materials that I needed. This was my first time working with wood, and man. I felt like I was in grad school again, trying to make something new with no time (only this time, there was no professor, no help!). I didn’t realize how much work goes into measuring, cutting, prepping, staining, and sealing wood. In 90-degree weather, around 7 pm for days (2 weeks before the show), I was outside in three layers of clothes (the mosquitoes were brutal), prepping and staining the oak wood. The fumes were so strong I can’t believe I thought two K95 masks would protect me. It was rough.
Before pre-staining, when I measured and cut all the wood, I was able to make a perfect window with the capiz shells. But for some reason, after staining the wood and adding the photo to the shells, the mock-up I made with that same wood and same shells did not create that perfect window. This discovery occurred on Saturday morning, one day before we were scheduled to install. In a matter of seconds, and in a panic-thinking moment, it hit me: I was indeed making that wind chime. Just as quickly as I abandoned that idea, quick was I, to take those pieces from the window and to make that windchime.
Here is a video of Untitled (A Remembrance) in motion.
Choosing the Photograph + Title:
Before I started building Untitled (A Remembrance), I went through two boxes of my mother's and lola’s photographs, containing images from my mom’s childhood, my lola’s early years in America, and our family in the Philippines. I saw images of family I had met in the Philippines in 2023 and of those that I never got to meet. Notes written on the back of these photographs, a mixture of Tagalog and English, read, “A remembrance” with whoever’s name was in the photo.
I read these words, and cried thinking about what my lola left behind. The family she left and the memories she missed. Things she would only remember and know about through photographs. Those photographs and notes written on the back led me to the title.
Looking through the boxes, I found this photo my lola took of a boat. It looked like the boat we were on when we spread my mother’s ashes in the Philippines. There was something so peaceful and beautiful about the sea and the sky together. I had a pile of photographs I wanted to use, but this photo kept calling me. Using this photograph, I realized, my lola was a photographer. It was my lola who always had cameras, and as a result, my mother always had cameras. It was my lola, who bought me my first digital camera as my undergrad graduation gift, and it was that camera that carried me to LA and how I became an artist. Those realizations became my connections to the theme of “What They Left Us”.
And as a bigger message, through this photograph, as my partner pointed out, most migration stories started with a boat.
Reflections:
Untitled (A Remembrance) is still a work I am understanding, but what I have learned is that sound is a portal. Like smell and sight, sound is an important way for us to remember. Through this journey, I accept that sometimes, we have to go the long way to understand the way we are meant to go. Or that the long way is the way we’re meant to go. Tupac once said, “I try to find my friends, but they’re blowin’ in the wind”. It isn’t often, but my mother speaks to me through the wind, and through this, the wind chime from Paris and the one I have made, I see how mighty the wind is. Wind is a portal. It is an element we can’t see, but is one that can be heard and felt…just like Universal cosmic energy, just like our ancestors. We can’t see them, but we know they are there.
Thanks for reading. Until next time.
Additional Information:
The shells are connected through thin sewing threads. I chose to use this thread because of its fragility. The image is split up into pieces as a metaphor for our fragile memories and how we remember the past in parts, like a grid of this photograph.
