Can I Grieve That Which Never Was?
Official website for artist Nicole Rademacher
Nicole Rademacher, Rademacher artist, Los Angeles, Chile, Barcelona, interdisciplinary, research-based, contemporary artist, conceptual artist, adoptee, adoptee voices, social practice artist, public practice artist, art therapy
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Can I Grieve That Which Never Was?
Can I Grieve That Which Never Was? consists of sixteen framed 5 × 7 in. photo collages and seventeen 8 × 10 in. collages arranged in a photo album.
Using photographs from my childhood with my adoptive family, I cut my own figure from each image and replaced it with vellum. In the album, these altered photographs are layered with photographs of my biological family from roughly the same period.
The wall installation removes me from the family photographs in which I was present. The album brings two family archives into relation, placing the life I lived alongside images of a family life I did not experience. Across both forms, the work considers absence, imagined belonging, and grief for something that was never actually possessed.
