Memory Path

Memory Path:  A Pilgrimage Through the Thicket

Crosses, ghosts, dogs, ribbons, wounds, coiled climbing roses, skies, roadside memorials, churches, fence wires, living folks, fires, roadsides, ribbons, eyes, sunflowers, deer, silver tea sets, Alabama woods, and the Mississippi Delta are among images that emerge in Southside Art Gallery’s “Memory Path: A Pilgrimage Through the Thicket,” an art exhibit by Blair Hobbs and Maude Schuyler Clay.

Blair’s mixed-media art relies on penned words, familiar symbols, and metaphors to craft her visual narrative. Blair paints, draws, glues, and stitches swaths of memory—ghost faces, pressed flowers, and still wings onto canvases. Many of her materials are also culled from memory, such as high-school majorette sequins, paper dolls, her grandmother’s embroidery thread, and a lifetime of broken Christmas tree balls.

Maude’s Photography documents a vanishing Mississippi Delta and its stark decay, but also captures portraits and home life--lush against porch rails and wisteria curtains. Churches fall. Barns list. Children grow. Maude’s photographs--full of sunlight and overcast shadows—capture concrete images before--over the brambled path of time--they transform or disappear.

In Memory Path: A Pilgrimage Through the Thicket, both Blair and Maude remind us of the power in what leaves us, what we abandon, and what we’re destined to keep.