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“Hi, I'm Connie Albertson. I'm a faculty member in the department of art, and this
is an installation that I've been working on for quite some time now. It's called 'Storyteller,'
and it's a narrative ceramic piece that tells the life story of
my mother.
“The piece is laid out in the form of a clock face. There are 12 pieces around the
circle and one in the center, where the hands of a clock would be.
“Each piece has a specific story attached to it, and they all tell a story about somebody
who invented herself, essentially. She started off as an orphan in the Appalachians. She
became the highest civil servant rank servant that you can get without
a congressional appointment in the Small Business Administration.
“She loved to read, and one of her favorite things was to hide — you know, in little
places where people couldn't find her — and read. And she described one day sitting in
a tree, high in a tree, with her book and looking up and looking out over the
mountains and thinking that there had to be a lot more.
“This is her wedding to my father, and it utilizes a children's nursery rhyme that suggests
good news/bad news. The marriage ended badly, but there were good things that happened as
well.
“Being a mother was part of what she wanted to do in her life, and she was an amazing
mother. Inside the piece you can see — she used to say that a parent's job is to give
children roots and wings, and so I used that imagery to talk about that.
“This is a period of my mother's life that was really tragic. Her marriage disintegrated
fairly violently, and we were impoverished — food stamps, you know, the whole nine
yards. She was also a practicing alcoholic at that time, and there were
suicide attempts, and it was a pretty awful time in all of our lives.
“In the late 1960s/early '70s, my mother got sober, joined AA and immediately started
focusing on helping other people overcome alcoholism. After she got sober, my mother's
life got better and better. She made some bold career moves and joined the
Civil Service as an employee of the Small Business Administration and became a very
popular speaker, both in AA and in her professional life.
“And my brother and I started having children, which meant that something that she had always
wanted was to be a grandmother, but it wasn't really working out so well. Her health began
to decline, as well as her hearing and whatnot, and so she
wasn't the kind of grandmother — didn't get to know her grandchildren quite as well
as she would've wanted.
“The last stage of her life is also good news/bad news. She was highly celebrated,
both in AA and in her professional life. Unfortunately, she was also suffering from a terrible back
problem, and around this time had an operation that, while
technically successful, she also contracted a hospital illness that eventually caused
her death.
“Here we are back at the beginning, where we have the possibilities in the bird's nest
but we also have the bird that is no longer alive.
“The centerpiece over here was actually the first piece that I made in this series.
She was in the hospital for roughly seven or eight weeks. All I could do was sit by
the bed and draw or read, and this came from drawings that I did, mostly in the
last couple of days of her life. And that was the image that stuck with me, of someone
who had in her heart this enormous optimism about the future and now was dying. So this
was the piece that kind of started my idea about what this installation
would be.”