vanessa filley artist|maker

I remember the day, at age six, when my great-grandmother’s childhood home was torn down.  It was an opulent place with ballrooms and gilded halls long abandoned for a smaller more practical house on the same property.  Pre-demolition my father lead my older sister and I through the dusty halls and I gapped at the buckling floors and broken windows, imagining what it might have been like to inhabit the space between those walls.  There was another house down the road where my father grew up, where I grew up spending summers, weekends and holidays and where until recently my children spent all of their Christmases.  Two years ago my grandfather passed away and in his passing, this family home, this gathering place, this place of memory ceased to exist.  This loss made me frantic.  I had a desperation to document the place so that I might never forget it, so that my memory might be prompted by the images of a certain room or bench or tree.  Now that this home, this place where I belonged, is gone I have a compelling need to document spaces slated for demolition or drastic renovation, spaces where the possible lives that passed between the walls are palpable or inspire a certain sense of possibility.  In Ghosts Immemorial I aim to bring a whisp of life to spaces forgotten, abandoned, left for dead, spaces we can no longer afford to live in or maintain, spaces deemed no longer necessary for contemporary life, spaces in need of new life.