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Come like shadow; so depart ...

With these words, the three witches in MacBeth call upon Banquo's ghost. Likewise their words set the context for this work.

On a lovely spring day with a fresh breeze coming off the lake, I came across some late 19th-century funeral cards at a waterfront flea market. Later after careful scrutiny, I realized they had been collected by one man, John Lockie, who had lived near Galt, Ontario.

During those days, cards were printed and sent out whenever someone died ... inviting family, friends and neighbours to the funeral. Lockie had over 84 such announcements in his collection, including one for the funeral of his older brother Thomas.

In my piece, I developed color photo prints of the cards and displayed them on a wall roughly by family grouping. A video of a stream of people rushing for commuter trains after work in the late 1990s is projected over the cards.

When visitors enter the gallery, they too become part of the piece. People seem drawn to the cards. As they approach to look more closely at the names, they interrupt the beam of light; thereby casting their own shadow upon the wall ... inadvertently, entering into the continuum of life and death.

This installation has been shown at the Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

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© Maggie Dorning. All rights reserved.