Open Door Gallery

Eleanor Rubin - Memory, Memory Loss and Imagination

January 14 - April 12, 2013

Film Screening - The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer's - February 12, 2013 6pm

Special Event - Finding Inner Harmony - March 6, 2013 4pm

The Open Door Gallery presents an exhibit and inquiry about Alzheimer's disease and its impact on elders and their families.

Artist's Statement

The body of work on view as part of Progress of The Eclipse: Memory, Memory Loss and Imagination was created over an extended period 1990 - present.

These woodcuts grew out of the pain of being a caregiver for a beloved person, my mother, who was transformed and diminished by Alzheimer’s disease and who died in 1992. Even at this distance from the years of her illness, the losses she suffered suffuse my thoughts. I am 20 years older now, at an age when friends are caregivers for spouses with Alzheimer’s disease. And long-range concerns for my own memory are a part of my life as a woman in my 70s.

Creating images during the period of my mother's illness fulfilled a need for self-transformation during times when the emotional burden was too great to be relieved by words. The work that grew out of this period of care giving developed a visual vocabulary for grief, disassociation and metamorphosis which became a visual language of resilience.

During the period of caregiving, my daily life would not have appeared unusual to a casual observer. I went to work, saw friends, led a supported life of comfort with my husband, David. Our grown children visited often. But underneath that appearance of normalcy I felt lost, vulnerable, and unsafe. I was floating in some space just our of range of connection. I was submerged in a confusion I could not express with words. Though I appeared to be present, I felt displaced and alien. The images Lost Self and Taking Leave arose out of this period.

At the time of my mother's illness, more than at any other time before, my studio became my haven. To crossover the threshold of my studio was to enter a space where I had tools for reconnecting with myself. Even the mindless elements of preparation like sharpening woodcut tools, rearranging postcards on my studio wall, became part of the transition toward concentration. This mood of suspended attention and the sound of Bach cello suites playing softly in the background, allowed me to enter an inner space. I could pick up carving tools and a woodblock and begin to carve and draw my way into an image without conscious thought. Often, I began cutting without a plan. It was good to gouge wood, to make small, delicate incisions, to cut with force and vigor. It was good to have the resistance of the wood. It was also good eventually to print these carved blocks with black and red ink. In the woodcut, Progress of the Eclipse, the streaks of red connote danger but also glimmers of hope. In many of my images, the process and the subject matter are closely connected: Memory is the subject and transformation is part of the process. I value the possibilities in my woodcuts which are printed in a series of variations, the ghosts of one becoming the background for another as is the case in Fugue and Fugue (Variation).

My prints and watercolors are in many permanent and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wiggin Gallery of Boston Public Library, and the Boston Athaneaum.

The images from that period have been published in journals of the humanities, Torn From Her Moorings, (The New Renaissance, 1997), in journals concerned with medical care and ethics, Taking Leave (Innovations in End of Life Care, 2001), in a journal of geriatric psychiatry, Inventing A Visual Language of Resilience (Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry: International Universities Press, 2000), in Rain And Resurrection by Irun Cohen, MD (Landes Bioscience 2010) and in a book devoted to my artwork, Eleanor Rubin: Dreams of Repair (Charta, Milan, 2011).

For additional images and published articles from this caregiving period and beyond, visit my website or .

The Open Door Gallery promotes the work of artists with disabilities and shifts our community's perceptions of ability while enjoying quality art.