A Bee in Her Bonnet by Noelle McCleaf
A Bee in Her Bonnet (from Robert Herrick’s “Mad Maid’s Song,” 1648), photographically illustrates curious reunions between mother and daughter. Photographs are constructed from a combined source of personal narratives, reflecting on time lost and found.
Together as mother and daughter, we meet and recall our past experiences from what seems like lifetimes ago. The sweltering evening heat, lingering from oppressive southern days, induces visions of time gone by. Artifacts of relatives past litter the landscape, like ripe and rotting fruit—memories returning to the soil to be remade. Through pictures, we construct our chronicles, creating altered allegories from cultivated clues.
In these images, we revisit our ancestry through collective memory, remaking, reinventing, and reclaiming our history through photographs. Times have changed, and we have spent years apart, but when looking through a kaleidoscope of family film negatives, we find that we remain intrinsically the same. The photographs in A Bee in Her Bonnet catalogue our transformations and experiences from the past, through the present, and into the future. They create new narratives that continue to tie us together, worlds apart, yet forever linked in converging histories.
Noelle McCleaf lives and works on the coast of Florida.
To view more of Noelle's work, please visit her website.
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You can purchase Under the Tangerine Tree from Fraction Editions.
Cat's Cradle
My Mother is a Bear
Great Aunt Josephine Haynes
Long Shadows and Spanish Moss
Under the Tangerine Tree
Erma and Milly’s Collars, 1898
Familial and Ancient
Mamma Ruth’s Apron, 1939
The Filet
Daughter Unencumbered (Erma’s Apron, 1923)
The Scout
The Matriarch Assumes Her Crown (Family Hair Wreath, 1885)
Runaway Bunny (Grandmother Dorothy’s Painting)
Guard, Guide, Direct, Protect (Mother’s Chant)
She Still Smells Sweetly of Honey
For All Relations (Of Flesh and Feathered Kind)
The Outside Shower
The Deep Woods Kitchen
The Mother-Fish