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NS-104 - 2023

Rural highways take us past places like vibrant small towns and villages that form the cornerstone of communities. Drivers may discount these smaller settings as folksy and anachronistic, speeding past them and miss the signs and details that share important information about who has lived here, and what community members mean to each other. In these photos, I explore the artefacts and memorials that community members leave behind when someone dies, showing the specific and special touches that speak to both the unique nature of person who was loved, and how that person’s death has impacted their community.

Inspired by my own grandparents’ deaths and the process of finding traces of them after their deaths in their homes and hometowns, I document the details of these traces in the lives of other people. In smaller communities such as the one my grandparents come from, these traces provide opportunities for regular remembrance within the community, planting the seed for that person’s legacy to grow and for their memory to continue. Boats no longer in use, empty fishing shacks, cars for sale, and piles of personal property prompt us to ask each other who owned them and to remember the person’s name and nature. Taken along NS 104 and concentrated in Pictou County, these photographs ask us to stop and consider why some objects come to stay at the side of the road, what meanings they might have, and what messages they tell us about the real people who lived and left pieces of themselves to be remembered by.

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