Measure of a Life

My 88-year old mother moved into a nursing home in Sept. She had reached the point of needing 24-hour care both physically and mentally. As her eldest child and only daughter, I was left to make the decision and it was a tortuous one. I felt that I should care for her at home even though I knew that trying to do so would break me quite quickly.

Recently, cleaning out her home in preparation for selling it, I found a cache of old documents - birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, military records, etc. I had needed to put my struggles into some cathartic exercise, and suddenly it dawned on me what I wanted to do. I have scanned these old documents and cut glyphs from them to form a family of fonts. I’ve then used these fonts to create Measure of a Life.

It seems only yesterday that I ran wild on the farm, my parents and grandparents a forcefield of security, and death something too abstract and distant to have any meaning. Now I stand at the apex of my family, the bridge between the generations ranging behind me and those before me, my great-granddaughter now the feral child. How do I feel about this position? Everything and nothing, a chaos that can only be expressed somewhere beyond words. How does one measure a life - a few documents, a few photos, a plot in the cemetery, a great pang in the heart?

This work continues a pricing innovation I introduced with my first work of 2023, What If. For the first week, collectors of my previous projects may collect the token for free. At the beginning of the 2nd week, the remaining editions will be offered for sale to new collectors. At the beginning of the third week, the remaining editions will be burned. I intend to use this sales approach through June, 2023 while releasing at least one project per month. My goals are to 1)reduce my fretting about the sales and marketing aspects of my art, 2)reward my supporters, and 3)encourage livelier secondary trading of my work.

This piece uses custom fonts created by the artist as visual and symbolic components. Being fonts, these are pre-rendered. All other components are algorithmic.

Created by Wanda Oliver (wandaoliver.tez) in Feb., 2023.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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