… she never removed, she covered over. At forty these pictures were an inch deep, at sixty a good two inches from the wall, the originals were, as she herself was, nothing erased but much submerged.

—Djuna Barnes, from Ryder

In this collaborative performance, poet Kristin Prevallet burns one of her diaries in a ritual of time-based performance as photographer Suzanne Levine captures images of the burning text. A word and image essay, "Nothing Erased But Much Submerged” reveals memory as a process in which fragments of earth, emotion, and text are consolidated into a singularly charged moment in which fire burns through the pages of a young girl’s diary.

The project asks viewers to reflect on their own relationship to memory: what do diaries contain that we feel the need to hold onto them for so many years? Is letting go of the past ever possible? Are memories real, or are they always in the process of being erased? Do objects actually hold the past, or do they simply trigger memories that we hold in our bodies?

Installation included in the group show Drawing on Language, Hastings-on-Hudson Municipal Art Gallery, May - June, 2016.

Installation reviewed in "Text and Imagery Commingle in Paean to Poetry," The Rivertowns Enterprise, May 6, 2016.

Featured in Guernica, May 2016: "A Burning Is Not A Letting Go,"

suzannotype