Joan Giroux

These photographs depict artist Joan Giroux’s mother, who worked as a geriatric nurse before she became a hospice nurse. One is printed against a floral background derived from her kitchen wallpaper, the other against a pattern on a hospital gown.

In this series, Giroux created diptychs honoring loved ones-hers or her friends’-with one print citing the subject’s date of birth and the other their date of death. These works remind us that death is a foundational human experience. In Giroux’s words, “Debility, illness, death, and dying were frequent guests in my childhood home. Speaking of her work, my mother recalled hand-drawn cards on a nightstand, a woman whose family seldom visited, the nurse whose husband was recently diagnosed. Quite young, I learned that we are all of us complete, and none of us whole, simultaneously.”