Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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61 OCTOBER 2019 "The parallels are amazing, People who are making art are going off the edge of a map, which is very similar to people doing scientific research, they're going off the edge of a map too." — Olivia Parker CONTACT pem.org; oliviaparker.com to animals as a way of assigning character traits. "Theories abound, and I'm always fascinated about how far to the side they go," says Parker. Some of her latest work was inspired by both science and the brain. In 2013, her husband John was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. After he went to a care facility, Parker started running across the stacks of notes John used to help him remember and they provided some insight into what he was going through. One of them is a list of the places the couple had visited on their honeymoon. "I put it in this light and photographed it and printed it a couple of different ways, and it seemed something was there," says Parker. "I can't know what John was thinking. It's really my imagination on his illness. I was continually experimenting, pushing to see how far I could take this idea." She used glass bottles to make streaks of colored light across the notes that suggest impermanence or "flashes of lucidity," explains the photographer, who is realizing how much the series on her husband's illness has helped other people, especially caregivers. Throughout her life, Parker has managed to pivot her work to adjust to new circumstances. With its large photography collection right down the road from her, Parker has decided to gift the works from the current exhibition to PEM. In the meantime, she will get back to work, finding a certain peace and resilience in the depths of her own imagination.