Ginny Crow

Grave Digging

This monoprint series, made with lithography and freeform ink use, explores the social implications of Mary Bambrough's grave. Ms. Bambrough's final resting place is in a small abandoned cemetery outside of Crested Butte, Colorado. This cemetery was once adjacent to a mining town in the "old west" of the 1880s United States, but when resources dried up in Colorado the mining community deconstructed their homes and moved to the California gold rush. None of Mary Bambrough's surviving relatives visit her grave, despite it being the largest and most ornate in her now forested graveyard. 

I have visited this grave every year when the snow melts enough that modern visitors can access Mary's seculded spot, and wondered about her memory. Judging by the comparatively lavish marker, her parents, Foster Bambrough and his wife, clearly loved Mary very much. What does it mean to be a parent who lost a child? How does that grief manifest, and how long does grief linger? What of the Native American cultures that pioneers like the Bambrough family displaced? Who was left when the white mining community moved on? 

There are no records that answer these questions for us, making the legacy of the American past difficult to untangle from the mythology of our present. I studied my own questions about Mary in this series, using a photograph I took of her headstone, snippets of writing from my journal, and photos of my own Texan ancestors from this time. I find the past is never impersonal--often it is as emotional as the present.