COLUMBIA, Ky. – When patrons view Dani Ford’s art show at Lindsey Wilson College, it will be not unlike reading her diary. At least that’s how the Jamestown, Kentucky, artist interprets the 10 pieces featured in her show, “Live for Me: A Conversation with Grief.”
Ford’s works are on display through March 3 in the Lucretia C. Begley Gallery in the college’s W.W. Slider Humanities Center. A gallery talk – which is free and open to the public – will be held at 2:30 p.m. CT on Tuesday, Feb. 25. Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-4 p.m. CT Monday-Friday.
“It feels almost like someone’s reading my diary when they look at the pieces in here. It’s very personal,” Ford said as she walked through the Begley Gallery.
Ford’s show was inspired by the sudden death last year of her maternal grandmother, Faye Price. Known as Mamaw by family members, Price was “definitely the glue for all of us, and she is truly responsible for the person that I am today,” said Ford, who also teaches art and arts administration classes at Lindsey Wilson.
Ford said that her grandmother’s death was “my first experience with profound loss.”
“When someone spoke about losing someone, I never really understood what that meant before losing her,” said Ford. “That kind of loss hit me in ways that I just didn’t imagine.”
And Ford said she hopes her show will help others who are struggling with grief, no matter the cause.
“As artists, I think we have a duty to offer answers to some of life’s most profound questions,” she said. “For me, this show is trying to answer the question of grief. … Art has always been, at its best, an invitation – whether that’s an invitation to feel, to remember, to heal, or to simply be in the moment. My hope is that my work, in some way, extends that invitation to those who experience it.”
As Ford notes in her artist statement, grief is “an unspoken conversation.”
“It lingers in the places we once stood together, in the echoes of words left unsaid,” she writes. “My work is a reflection of that space – the space between love and loss, presence and absence, past and present.”
One of the show’s centerpieces is “Sunbather,” an acrylic painting on a wood panel that is based on a Polaroid picture taken in the 1970s of Ford’s grandmother lounging in a bathing suit in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Other pieces in the show are also inspired by Ford’s relationship with her grandmother – “Messenger,” a drawing of a blue heron in acrylic on a canvas, and “Moonlit Currents,” another acrylic piece based on a snapshot Ford captured while thinking of her late grandmother.
Other memories include a landscape watercolor and acrylic painting of a last-minute trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains that Ford took with her grandmother.
“We ended up staying in a teepee, and my Mamaw, who was so prissy, said when we pulled up to this place, ‘I’m way too citified for this,’” said Ford. “So I just wanted to kind of hold on to some of those really good memories that I have with her.”
Ford’s show also includes an installation titled “What Do You Need To Day,” in which patrons are invited to write a statement, prayer or comment on a Post-it note and affix it to the gallery wall.
“I want people to express words that might remain unspoken in their lives,” said Ford. “I wanted to give them a chance to leave the last words to someone they never got to say them to, like I did with my Mamaw.”
As Ford writes in her artist statement: “It’s a space for healing, for remembering, for honoring the invisible threads that connect us to those we’ve lost.”
Photo: LWC DANI FORD – Lindsey Wilson College art instructor Dani Ford of Jamestown, Kentucky, stands next to “Sunbather,” an acrylic painting on a wood panel that is based on a Polaroid picture taken in the 1970s of Ford’s late grandmother. “Sunbather” is one of the pieces featured in Ford’s show, “Live for Me: A Conversation with Grief,” which is on display through March 3 in the Lucretia C. Begley Gallery in Lindsey Wilson’s W.W. Slider Humanities Center. Ford will give a gallery talk at 2:30 p.m. CT on Tuesday, Feb. 25.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson College)