“My Mother’s Legacy” is a 1,000 line poem wood-burned into the bottom of 1,000 wooden bowls. On each bowl is written a line from my memory that reflects a mannerism, advice, or a remark I attribute to my mother. The bowls are piled randomly onto tables, where the viewer must pick up each bowl to read it. The act of lifting each bowl reminds me of my mother, because she had t he habit of turning things over to see where they were made.

When my mother died of breast cancer in 1965 she was 47 and I was 13. Over the years, I carried around a lot of memory fragments. But I could not fit them together to fully understand who my mother had been as a person. In 1995, to commemorate the anniversary of her death, I began to write down all the things I did remember.

These are the lines that became “My Mother’s Legacy”.