“Did it all really happen this way and not that way?”
Fat Strawberries: A Decade in Review
As a child, I sought privacy through a constructed world.
A world of images born of Walmart disposable cameras and the frenzied marks of pen put to construction paper.
Twenty years later, Fat Strawberries emerged, with pen and paper and various cameras again, but this time precision, too. These photographs and works on paper are about the unruliness of longing–touch from others, consistency in routine, tenacity for hope, small pleasures – life.
How it emerges with force during crises.
The impossibility of it.
At the start of this series, one of my closest friends passed away. All I could do was study every photograph I ever made of him. I was desperate to remind myself that he very much existed in my life. All I could do was imagine his return, so I retreated to that assembled world from childhood. In order to pull myself back into reality, I sought simplicity. I started cooking with abandon. I started eating fat strawberries barefoot in the grass.
Today, I consider how this secret, assembled realm informs my extensive archive—a tall stack of meticulously organized binders—that fix the memories of my past in the unrelenting movement of my present. This determined precision, willful fantasy, and fit of sadness evolves into reverence within the bounds of a photograph or preserved note. The archive is undeniable proof that I have access to beauty, to love, to abundance.
I study the evidence, finding both comfort and mourning in how it pushes against my understanding of truth, of The Now. Did it all really happen this way and not that way?
Grace Ann Leadbeater is an artist and educator invested in words, pictures, and bookmaking. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design as well as a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Grace Ann grew up in Central Florida and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
