NANCY EDELSTEIN photography

Friday Night Dinners

After opening a box given to me by my mother,  I realized that the dishes inside held stories that were both personal and universal. These Danish porcelain plates, bowls and serving pieces, twenty years earlier, had been the backdrop for my grandmother’s beautiful table settings every Friday night for the first 18 years of my life. Their translucent texture and hand painted waves and sky, seagulls and sea creatures, had gone unnoticed by me all those years. I was now inspired to capture close ups of these exquisite details which I then modified in a variety of ways and printed on vellum pages. Many of these abstractions were sandwiched together and reshot through a light box, creating unique, softly layered compositions. 

As the project developed, forgotten memories of family moments and traditions surfaced, and it became clear that these dishes held the imprint of my family’s history. This work has evolved into both a series of fine art images and an installation, as well as an artist’s book of the same name.