All My Love Always No Matter What is a seven-volume book collection of letters written by the artist’s mother, Sue, to her only son, Tom (TR Ericsson). It took nearly twenty years and numerous other projects for the artist to finally gather this material into a singular work. In 2004, the year after his mother’s death, fragments of her letters first appeared in a self-published magazine and as part of an installation at a non-profit art center in the Bronx. Her letters have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums as sculptures, paintings and works on paper; her recorded voice narrates a feature length film the artist made in 2015. More recently, a large-scale outdoor sculpture was made in bronze of three typed letters, and a multi-page letter work was produced as a special commission for the SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, Georgia) to be shown in dialogue with letters and manuscripts from the Frederick Douglass Family Archive. What emerges in this now complete collection of letters, is a vibrant but at times tortured individual who though struggling with a variety of abuses and addictions was still capable of great wit and humor and love: a portrait far more revealing than the image of an unknowable face. For the artist’s ongoing project “Crackle & Drag” (2003 – present) it acts as a source for many previous works, as well as likely future creations that chronicle his mother’s journey, mapping relationships across three generations in post-industrial midwestern America.

Volume 1 begins with a card written to her father describing a wedding party she hosted for her sister-in-law and the special “Royal Daulton” plates she set out for it. By volume 4 while still only in her fifties, she writes her last letter to her son and daughter-in-law, a brief note that ends humorously but with an ominous overtone, “Treat yourselves, it’s all going to be gone one way or another.” The seven volumes, mostly in her own words, chart a slow descent from her early years as a young wife and new mother to a lonely isolated figure with less and less to live for. But more than charting her degradation, the letters bring us closer to their author revealing a touching intimacy between mother and son that both expresses the love the work is really about and empowers its title. The artist has painstakingly assembled each book with a loving thoroughness that avoids interpretation or explanation, instead it’s his mother's voice alone that is driving the narrative. In volumes 1 - 5 all the remaining typed or handwritten texts had to be digitally reproduced in rigorous detail to the exact scale of the original correspondence and then organized into a chronological timeline. Volumes 6 and 7 have audio and video components embedded in cut out pages inside the books along with a complete transcription of each recording. A profuse and disorderly jumble of original audio recordings including countless answering machine messages had to be observantly arranged into the same dated chronology as the letters. This slow and methodical process led the artist to many surprising discoveries, including his mother’s final recorded message to him just days before her death.

VOL. 1 LETTERS 1971 - 1991
VOL. 2 LETTERS 1991 - 1993
VOL. 3 LETTERS 1994 - 1998
VOL. 4 LETTERS 1998 - 2003
VOL. 5 NOTES & GREETING CARDS c.1970s - 2003
VOL. 6 VOICE RECORDINGS c.1994/95 - 2003
VOL. 7 VIDEO 9/30/01 5:18PM