Their Words, 2014, Mixed media, size variable
“I still don’t feel I have full permission to tell my mother’s story,” Burson said. “I am uncovering and covering it up again with the print-making media that I use. Like a palimpsest where two or more successive texts have been written, each one erased to make room for the next, I print, then scratch over it, or print again and overlay, creating a kind of visual hide and seek.” There is a quote, from the Irish writer Colm Tóibin, which Burson has on her studio wall and has excerpted in her work. “It seems that the essential impulse in working at all is to rehaunt your own house, or to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul and find form and structure for it.”
And that takes courage: “The courage to get in there and express what is fully human. I believe that is the artist’s responsibility, but I struggle with this. My mother said, when she attended a show of mine, ‘I wish this wasn’t my history.’ ” And yet, Burson has received letters and emails from people who’ve been to her shows—Native American Indians, immigrants, people whose family histories have nothing to do with this particular story—who feel a kinship. Don’t we all seek release from the power of untold stories? This ghosting on the page of images behind images, of letters dripping before being entirely washed away, of letters falling through space, of fragmented language and lost narratives, and maps like arteries with cities named like organs in an anatomy lesson of the planet—all these graphic signifiers, elegant and chilling, have a pulse that carries us back to the heart. “Perhaps the most important discovery,” writes Burson in her artist statement, “was the life and beauty in the writing itself. In repeatedly drawing and printing the lines of script, my hand became one with theirs. Their handwriting became my art.” Burson has understood the connection between art and healing for a very long time. While she was living in Memphis, her best friend was diagnosed with cancer. When Burson visited they drew and sang together, and she saw how much it helped them both. In the back of her mind she wanted to explore this relationship in her working life.
The Pages Bore Traces II, 2014, Monoprint on paper, 29” x 37”
“The best job I ever had was when I was hired at Vanderbilt back in the late 1980s to find artwork for new building renovation and the medical center. Something came across my desk about the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up to me. I discovered that all over the country, people
26 | March 2015 NashvilleArts.com