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.”