My dad wrote to tell me that my great-great-grandparents’ grave markers were going to be replicated and replaced. The markers had eroded to near illegibility after witnessing almost a century of seasons in Niagara Falls, NY. Each winter droplets of mist froze in the porous sandstone, expanding and taking bits of text away as it thawed.


He wrote that it would be a shame to discard or destroy the stones, and so asked me if I wanted them for some artistic purpose. Another reason why I may want them, he reminded me, is that one has my own name carved into it. The great-great-grandfather buried there, Max Spitzer, is the one I inherited my name from.


Max’s oldest son’s name was Martin, and his oldest son’s name was Matthew, and his oldest son’s name was Mark, and his oldest son is me.


Having agreed to take responsibility for the tombstones, I soon travelled up to visit the cemetery where they sat, a few miles downstream from Niagara Falls, wedged between a highway, some chain link fence, overgrown grass, and the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station. It’s infrastructure diverts water away from the Niagara River so that, rather than being drawn down over the edge of the falls, it finds a resting place in Lewiston Reservoir -before it takes another form and flows through the high voltage lines, which buzz and swoop above the cemetery.


And so, this project became one of possessions, and of materials possessed. Can I exhume the moments where patrimony is haunted by patriarchy? How many replications, transubstantiations, reanimations, can these things endure, and still sustain some mute, inner essence? Each substance is a reliquary for some spectral meaning, subsisting on suppositions that the provenance conveyed is true.


Photons travel from the sun, absorbed and reflected into our eyes, illuminating an image of eroding words: ‘lead kindly light.’

Our Erosion, 2020

hemlock and sandstone

Haunt, 2021

paper mache plinth, model landscape, ceramic cups incorporating tombstone dust

Still Niagara, 2021

paper mache plinth, video