Katherine Curry

Artist Statement

I took two notable photographs of my father when he came home to hospice: one when he got off the ambulance, and one when I found him after he’d passed. It was the second parent I found dead in their bed within the decade. It took 98 hours and 45 minutes for him to die, and it wasn’t an easy death; it was traumatic and painful for my dad, and painful to witness. In the last six hours of his life, his lungs began to fill with liquid, and he experienced what many call “The Death Rattle.” When someone is deathly ill, it feels necessary to compartmentalize, to categorize, to liken their bodies and processes to ones we know. When his rattle started, I did the same: “He sounds like a record scratch- now he sounds like hot water going through a coffee maker- now he sounds like-”...

This work is a series that explores the moment I found him: the shock response, the anxiety, the pain, the grief, the buried relief, the constant information that wouldn’t coalesce in my head. Each print is of the same original photograph I took when I found him, changed only by the transfer process. These images are distorted iterations of a memory, a trauma that I am slowly unpacking and processing.

While the documentation of these works is presented in a square format, the original pieces for consideration are circular transfers onto coffee filters in a limited 99 run edition. The ten selected present the breadth of this work, and hopefully convey in their fragility and texture not only the same emotional response at finding my father passed in his hospice bed, but the fragility of grief in the wake of his passing.

Katherine Curry | Portland, OR