One Response
to a Mother's Dying
by Steve Goddard

Hollis Sigler is an activist who communicates, through her art, concerns about cancer and the poisoning of our environment. I Would Read to Her Every Day (see below) is from a series of 10 paper cutouts collectively titled Etiquette for Dying. These works are a response to the death of Sigler's mother after a losing fight with breast cancer.

Sigler's choice of the silhouette as a format was inspired in part by a cut-paper illustration in a book of her mother's by 19th century English novelist Jane Austin.

Many of Sigler's works are set in a domestic interior -- traditionally a woman's space. Her choice to work in cut paper, a form of woman's work in the 19th century, may have been similarly inspired. Sigler has also noted that she chose to work in cut paper because this form was often used in the 19th century to memorialize loved ones. (In addition, the silhouette format is an element of Mexican Day-of-the-Dead imagery.) Sigler, who is fighting breast cancer herself, has defiantly subverted the silhouette, rendering it in white rather than in black -- her work, after all, concerns the living, not the dead.

Although she deals with an emotionally difficult theme, Sigler asserts a positive role for her art. She enlists the power of images to teach and to aid in the healing process. She has noted that "the good to come out of [having this disease] is to let other women know that they have to take care of themselves" and that "the same power that allows us to create negative experiences can be used to create positive experiences."

All of the Etiquette for Dying works incorporate texts on their frames. In this case the text concerns the psychic distance injected by "the etiquette of dying" between herself and her mother:

I would read to her every day. I knew she didn't hear me anymore. I knew that she was the star in her own drama without us.

Sigler appears elsewhere on the World Wide Web as a contributor to cancer victim support groups, and she has contributed to a limited edition volume of images and texts, Words Against the Shifting Seasons: Women Speak of Breast Cancer.

For further reading:
Debora Duez Donato, "Hollis Sigler Printworks," The New Art Examiner (March 1998).

Rockford College Art Gallery, Hollis Sigler. Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers. Rockford, Illinois, 1993 (exhibition catalogue).

Whitney Scott (ed.), Words Against the Shifting Seasons: Women Speak of Breast Cancer, 1994.

Hollis Sigler, Hollis Sigler's Breast Cancer Journal (forthcoming, fall 1999).

Goddard is senior curator at the Spencer Museum of Art.