Noelle
McCleaf

A Bee in Her Bonnet (2010-2014)

A Bee in Her Bonnet (from Robert Herrick's "Mad Maid's Song," 1648), photographically illustrates curious reunions between mother and daughter. Photographs are constructed from a combined source of personal narratives, reflecting on time lost and found.

Together as mother and daughter, we meet and recall our past experiences from what seems like lifetimes ago. The sweltering evening heat, lingering from oppressive southern days, induces visions of time gone by. Artifacts of relatives past litter the landscape, like ripe and rotting fruit—memories returning to the soil to be remade. Through pictures, we construct our chronicles, creating altered allegories from cultivated clues.

In these images, we revisit our ancestry through collective memory, remaking, reinventing, and reclaiming our history through photographs. Times have changed, and we have spent years apart, but when looking through a kaleidoscope of family film negatives, we find that we remain intrinsically the same. The photographs in A Bee in Her Bonnet catalogue our transformations and experiences from the past, through the present, and into the future. They create new narratives that continue to tie us together, worlds apart, yet forever linked in converging histories.

A Bee in Her Bonnet is a series of twenty-one archival pigmented prints made from medium format negatives, exhibited at 30x40.