Rita Puig-Serra – Where Mimosa Bloom

Artist: Rita Puig-Serra
Title: Where Mimosa Bloom
Publisher: Éditions du LIC
Year: 2014
BUY

Where Mimosa Bloom is a touching journey through the complexities of a relationship between a mother and daughter, an exploration of this as well as a personal examination of the experience of grief after loss. Weaving together visual representations of this relationship, Rita Puig-Serra takes us on a journey of familial devotion and love found exclusively in families the world over, weaving a poignant message together through ideas of trace, treasure and significance.

Throughout the book we find the images to hover between trace and absence, evidence of an existence as well as of overwhelming loss. The book cannot be viewed without a thought to Barthes and the power of the infamous winter garden photograph, with the work becoming a way of both cementing Costa’s loving relationship in existence alongside the loss of her mother.

The book becomes a haunting object for the viewer in this way; an ongoing reminder of the relationships we all hang on to, with our own emphasis on evidence and existence and the desperate desire we have to claim that we, too, were once here and we, too, were once loved.

‘When I came to your room and asked you for advice, or for something that I could hold on to forever, you said “stay strong, stay free, but most of all, be a good person.”