Sally Garner

Lives and works in Atlanta, GA, USA

Artist statement

I have a fear, like many of us, that one day my mind will not remember what is important from my past without realizing why. My mother’s mother had dementia, and just this past year my mother’s sister has started to show signs of early onset dementia. I’m filling in blanks and finding out that this trait can be hereditary. This is not news I want to be finding out about my family, and my possible future. I hated seeing my mother visit my grandmother and explain who she was to a very confused woman. My six year old brain invented a vision of the inside of my grandmother’s mind and it was dark and foreboding. On the other hand, my father’s mother was a sharp-witted woman that seemed to remember everything. She was the primary grandmother of my life; my sister and I called her Granny K. She had been a nurse, but in the time I knew her, Granny K could be summed up with word-puzzles, The Price is Right, and crocheting. Years later, I taught myself how to crochet and she corrected my amateur mistakes. While I was studying sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, she became ill from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I became frightened of what life after Granny K meant, and my fears were expressed through my body of artwork. For the past six years I have been creating installation art by filling spaces with crocheted video cassette tape ribbons. Although this series started out as an experimentation of materials, I quickly found the parallels to my life and fears...

Artwork