Mother Thought of Everything (2020)

Mother Thought of Everything
Amy Meissner
with photography by Brian Adams

What does it take to be Future Ready?

Throughout time, humans have developed essentials for survival—tools, kits and constructions for making it out of dire predicaments alive—anticipating the inconceivable. As the world faces the unprecedented, impacts will vary over time and with the ability of different societal and environmental systems to mitigate or adapt. Human lifeways and ecosystems will be changed. Future Ready was a global, open call for images, ideas, words and inventions as well as survival manuals or proposals for constructions and installations—all for future readiness, whether practical, imaginative or speculative. It also features a special project by Anchorage artist Amy Meissner, titled Mother Thought of Everything. Meissner sewed “suits” from Tyvek, abandoned quilts, used household protective equipment and other materials. The work addresses survival essentials, anticipation of the inconceivable, and our associations with place. Photographer Brian Adams worked to photograph the suits in various locations around Anchorage and in the landscape, to reflect upon place, time and future.

The first impulse is to bundle and hide my children.

In approaching Future Ready, Meissner said she realized her project was ultimately about ideas of protection, family and motherhood. Meissner, writes, “This project creates personal shelter from meager supplies and inadequate skills, seeking an alternative space of care and tending through the merging of the domestic and vast, of inner and outer realms, of mundane and ridiculous. Isolation, gearing oneself for moon, sea, storm, and safekeeping all formed conceptual scaffolding for the work, but the physicality of constructing such protection followed by the wearers’ sweltering complaints intensified all the unseen labor involved in loving someone fiercely - let alone saving them - during an era of environmental, political, and body failure.

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