It is often said that we live on after we die as long as we’re remembered. Because I have no heirs in the wings, I realized that when I die, memories of my ancestors will die with me. We’ll all be like so many fallen leaves from a dead family tree. Unless something memorable is done with the traces we leave behind. Solution: design and build narrative art installations using the ancestral ephemera in my care and find ways to share them publically. Even if no one sees my work, I figured, creating it will honor the memories of those who made my life possible.

Down the Drain is “Thing One” in a planned series of found-object iinstallations called Things We Meant to Do. With the exception of the scrolling text gizmo and miniature speaker purchased for this project, the installation consists entirely of objects I unearthed when, anticipating the need to down-size, I embarked on a preliminary house purge.

My husband, Matt Dooley, and I live in the McCandless house where I grew up. We bought it from my mother, Nancy Hall, when she moved to Massachusetts to be near her only grandchild. Mom took a fraction of our 5-bedroom family home’s contents to her new, much smaller digs. I became de facto custodian of everything else. Importantly, “everything else” included a miscellaneous plethora of belongings left behind by several generations – both maternal & paternal – and stockpiled since 1961 for lack of any better idea about what to do with them. Moreover, my sibs and I are the last of those generations and my house has become the final resting place of all that ancestral ephemera.

While cleaning out the attic and basement and separating things – as the professional organizers suggest – into KEEP, DONATE, SELL & TRASH piles, I noticed that the objects I thought would be junk were actually artifacts that carried both personal and cultural / historical meaning. Grouped a certain way, they were clues about the people who once owned them. They also raised questions; who were they? what did they do? what did these things mean to them or say about them? how did they live and what was happening around them?

Pretty soon the KEEP, DONATE, SELL , TRASH piles morphed into story-telling piles with biographical and socio-cultural history themes. Somewhere along the line, I developed an emotional attachment to this accidental, haphazard inheritance, which now seemed more like faint traces of once-vibrant lives; whispered goodbyes from the elders; a distilled ingredient or ghostly essence of my origins.

Down the Drain is biographical. Its purpose is to establish the theme of Ancestry and Legacy, which will recur throughout the series. The right side represents Mom’s side of the family. Her father – Lucian Faulkner (née Quintius Cincinnatius Laban) Williams – and his father, Lowry Caleb Williams – were dirt-poor West Virginia farmers who built their own houses (cabins), grew their own produce, killed their own meat & poultry, and pumped their own water. They were also avid readers (when they could get books) and writers (when they could get pencils) determined to “git above their raisin” by educating themselves. I dubbed the Williams branch of the family Hillbilly Scholars, a term I use with respect and admiration, and shelved some of their books and National Geographics on a ladder. When QL came of age, he changed his name to Lucian Faulkner Williams. “He was Luke in the city, QL on the farm,” says Mom, but he was always Papa to us kids. He was also a graphic artist at Duquesne Light, a multi-talented renaissance man, and an alcoholic.

Mom’s mother, Alice Elizabeth Gilpin Williams (dubbed Bambi before my toddler tongue could manage Grandmother) came from Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, and attended Alderson Broadus College in Phillipi. (Bambi “was college,” which set her apart from folks deemed “no better than commoners.”) She and her mother, Etta Ellen Willard Gilpin, wife of Henry Darling Gilpin, both lived to be 100 years old. In a recent conversation, my 90-year-old mother mused, “I think the Gilpins aspired to be Anglicans.” A polite way of saying they were a bit full of themselves. I called that branch Aspiring Anglicans and used their ephemera to represent them as such. Chandelier crystals and pearls suggest water dripping from the copper pipe under Bambi’s cane. The mink signals the Gilpins’ perceived affluence. I would have used Bambi’s mink pill-box but I like to wear it myself. On and around the small ladder are childrens’ books that Bambi and Papa read to us when we stayed at their Edgewood apartment. Hoppie the Hopper was my all-time favorite.

The mailbox anchoring my father’s side of the family served its postal purpose for 3-4 decades, surviving Dad by about 15 years. When rust rendered it floppy, Matt planted its replacement. For sentimental reasons, I saved it as a backyard ornament. It housed wrens’ nests for long enough to make me feel guilty about re-purposing it. The cascading cards and letters, probably 1-2 percent of the saved correspondence I found, are souvenirs of once thriving relationships, now bygone and largely forgotten. Several times while I was making the letter-fall, I succumbed to temptation and read what people had said to each other, myself included. The result: smiles, tears, recollections (both fond and cringe-worthy), discovery, puzzlement, surprise and a serious loss of productivity.

The middle and back windows on the left represent my father’s parents, Edith Mary Southwell Hall (Pam, thanks to an older cousin’s toddler tongue) and Arthur Hall (Papa). When Ede was a teenager, the Southwells immigrated to Pennsylvania from a town called Hales Owen, near Birmingham, in the English Midlands. I named this group Midlands Immigrants. When I was little, Pam told me – and retold on demand – lots of juicy stories about her own childhood. The fishing line dotted with buttons represents Pam, a seamstress who loved fishing. The brooch “catch” anchoring the line was part of Pam’s costume jewelry collection, which defaulted to me when nobody else wanted it. I have a picture of Pam and Papa fishing the Allegheny River. Pam is wearing a dress, hat and heels. Papa a white suit and boater.

Papa’s mother died in childbirth. Oddly, our genealogy traces her ancestry back to the 18th century. Not so with Pop’s father, known as Old Billy, a drunk who “rode the rails,” a practice that was not uncommon during the depression. Young Arthur was passed around among relatives as he grew. He became a coal picker “down the mine” before he reached puberty. Hence my choice of Itinerant Miners to characterize Dad’s father and grandfather. The picture on the back window shows Art in his mid-twenties, by which time he and Pam were married. At the end of Grampa Southwell’s shotgun. By the time Papa retired, he was a mine superintendent and had black lung. I found his bucket of coal in our garage, where it has been for as long as I can remember.

A couple people have asked about the roosters. All I know is that they were in our house from my earliest memory. And their feathers are very sharp. To the best of my knowledge, there weren’t any cock-fighting fans among my predecessors. A man at my recent artist talk thought they might have been fireplace-related. For now, the rooster question will have to remain open.

I’ve also fielded a few questions about the timepieces and wrist watches. Like keys, watches tend to proliferate over time and their provenance gets murky. I used watches to signify passage of time, loss of identity and forgotten or abandoned traditions. I once owned a fancy platinum watch that Bambi gave me for whichever birthday “tradition” dictates that grand-daughters are given watches, according to some arcane code of manners she followed. That watch would have been featured here if it hadn’t been stolen years ago, along with the traditional pearls (same code) that Bambi gave me for another birthday.

Last but not least, the scrolling text stream is composed of quips, quotes, axioms and informational tidbits from and about the ancestors this installation commemorates. The soundscape – created by Matt Dooley – is a mash-up of music, sound effects and spoken words, all keyed to the Ancestry and Legacy theme. Originally envisioned as ambient background or flavor, the finished nine-minute looping piece proved compelling enough to warrant focused attention. I added the red rocker for people to sit and enjoy a close listen.

Meg Dooley, November 2019

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