Mortsaf for My Father: the series ...

Although I had been exploring the topic of how we are remembered and how we remember others for some time, my father’s death provided impetus for me to engage with this topic on a far more personal level. 

Growing up, my family had a log house on a lake in the Laurentian mountains, and it was that place that I most closely identified with my father. In 2002, my family sold the property .  From that time until 2012, when my father died, I found it very difficult to look at photos or drawings of the lake. After my father died, I discovered that while I still find it very difficult to look at pictures of him, I can now look at the  thirty-plus years of material from the lake.

For me, Rainbow Lake and my father are inexorably intertwined: these things that I have created are my mortsafs, keeping his spirit and memories safe.

​I miss him every day.

My father, Carl Carruthers​, with my dog Maxine, circa 1989