After my grandmother, known to me as Wildmom, passed away, her purse was kept untouched between my mother and me for over fifteen years. This video pairs my ritualistic unpacking of the bag with an audio collage of conversations between myself, my mother, and my sister. Through the collection of our memories, we unfold the story of a remarkable woman who was top of her class but found herself in an unhappy marriage and was repeatedly expected to step into caregiving roles that were detrimental to her well-being.

Our remembrance of Wildmom is an act of recognition and grief that offers healing for the women in my family. It allows us to trace how patriarchal systems have shaped our family history and provides a way to identify, question, and transform our inherited roles. At once an archive and an assemblage, the purse reveals Wildmom’s life through the mundane and enigmatic objects she carried every day. Filling the space between our words and the contents of the bag is an intangible remnant — maybe a ghost — of the woman who once carried it. Perhaps it’s her scent, which still lingers in the bag’s leather folds.