ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Robinwood was Mae and Jim. With blueprints lifted from the December 1946 issue of Better Homes & Gardens, Robinwood was the house that my maternal grandparents built together and made their own with sweat, luck, and modest means on northern Michigan cow pasture land. And it was the locus of their lives for sixty years.

Today, Robinwood is gone. To me. It still stands, but it is not ours. Another family, complete with three young boys, holds the title. How strange that seems, after Robinwood had only girls for all its years prior. Gampa would have liked that. This change happened last year.

The year before that, Gamma had still been the matriarch of Robinwood. Widowed, Mae and her cat Boo held down the homestead in the wake of Jim’s slow passing. But when Mae died, Robinwood ended, too.

For the years before that, Robinwood had been the destination of our annual summer pilgrimages. I was the only grandchild. Thus, it was an ecstatically anticipated visit to the handsome white house that epitomized my devoted grandparents — a site of copious attention, play, calm, quiet, and formal family meals.

Years before that, Robinwood had also been the site of attention, play, calm, quiet, and formal family meals for my mother and her little sister, along with the aches and pains of growing up shy and bookish in a small town. The King Girls moved away from Robinwood for good after high school to lives marked by higher education, travel, and liberal outlooks.

Throughout, Robinwood was also a home for the women in Mae’s family. Bedrooms for her mother and two elder sisters, in turn, when living elsewhere was no longer desirable or feasible. At Robinwood, they were loved and cared for. And the women gave back as they could until the end of their own days.

By virtue of Robinwood’s manner of creation and life, the bones of the house were themselves endowed with the aura of Mae and Jim. Releasing it was wrenching, giving rise to an aching longing for its creators and its comforts. What you see here is a re-creation of the story of Robinwood that seeks to both contain and extend its life. Through a merging of archaic photographic printing methods with painting that mines the family’s archives, I have attempted to echo Jim and Mae’s handiwork.

Welcome to Robinwood.

Jillian Maia (King) (Weiss) Piccirilli
Oakland, CA
2014