There’s nothing quite like hearing the following words: “There’s been an accident…”

When my teen-aged daughter was involved in a terrifying car accident, she sustained brain injuries that threatened to change the trajectory of her life. The immediate repercussions and longer-term prognoses sent a wave of fear through us all. While she remained doggedly determined to continue with college plans, I lowered my expectations and nudged her toward more “realistic” goals. Alone but undaunted, she left for college, the myriad lingering effects of her injuries following her.

As she approached college graduation, I reflected (with a guilty conscience) on how it must have felt for her to have a mother who failed to believe in her resilience and tenacity. I created Recovery Room - a penance piece of sorts - to help me pay the price of that failure, to say “I’m sorry,” and to pay tribute to my daughter’s fierce and determined spirit.

Recovery Room is a photo-based installation. I re-photographed my daughter at the scene of her accident and combined the resulting Kodalith images with her X rays, scans and writings. Each image was sandwiched in plastic, hole-punched, and whip-stitched together with surgical scrub material. Safety pinning these “pieces” together created an enormous semi-transparent quilt, enveloping the entire room.

A broken car windshield, wrapped in sheets, was placed on a surgical gurney in the middle of the room. A recorded technician’s voice read medical reports, and the faint smell of bleach permeated the space. It was an altered reality, certainly meant to evince a strong sense of how easily a life can can be broken. Equally deliberate, however, was the sense of change and metamorphosis, the process of making wholeness from fragmentation, and the decision to find beauty in broken things restored.

-Monika Lidman