“Button Your Lip” by Mimm Patterson
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Mimm Patterson Artist Statement:
I am a writer and a visual artist.
Writing is how I compartmentalize the moments in my life that have shaped me. Visual art is how I tell the stories of my life when words cannot. Writing, for me, is ordered, like the card catalogue we used in our high school library. Visual art – my visual art – is messy. A little chaotic. It’s as if I’ve taken that card catalogue and thrown the cards into the air just to see where they might land.
This 6×6 inch encaustic photo collage is from a body of work I named ‘Small Stories About a Woman Named Barbara’. Barbara was the mother from whom I was estranged for two decades. The old buttons in the image are from the collection she kept next to her Singer sewing machine in an ancient freezer bag sticky with the tar from a million cigarettes. I found them after she passed while cleaning the cluttered single-wide trailer in which she lived for fifty years. Barbara’s life was not a happy one. Her first husband, my father, was in the Air Force and for a time stationed at Eielson Air Froce base in Fairbanks, Alaska. He was also a vile brute. When I found the buttons I envisioned my mother sitting at her machine, making a dress or an apron or curtains, a pack of Pall Malls nearby and an overflowing ashtray by her side.
