3.14 Embedded Memories by Edna Kurtz Emmet

There is certainly no question as to the specific subject in turning to two works that are part of a larger series focused on memory and the passage of time, by Edna Kurtz Emmet, from Baltimore, MD. “Embedded Memories” is a solar print and encaustic on paper, based on the image of the artist’s mother’s face just before her death. If the subject is clear, nonetheless, the image confronts the viewer with the question: what exactly are the memories embedded here?—even if we know who is portrayed. Her memories are hidden in a mind blocking our ability to penetrate it. There is also a reminder about other human limitations, as Emmet’s mother’s profile is paired with a detail from a gnarled and complex olive tree—a two-thousand-year-old tree, still growing, and thus underscoring the brevity of human life and how young relative to such members of creation we are at our oldest.

The image connects us at the same time to specifics of the Jewish and Christian narrative. For the tree shown in the image comes from the Garden of Gethsemane: It would have been very young when the Hebrew-Israelite-Judaean tree was beginning to bifurcate into Judaeans for Jesus and Judaeans not for Jesus branches—when, by Christian tradition, Jesus was spending his last night on earth as a human Judaean in that very garden. The two images are sandwiched between texts—Hebrew above and English below—enjoining one to honor one’s parents and thus “to live a long time in the land.”