“Marylou Was a Bookkeeper” is a recording of travel logs by Marylou Sutton that I found after her passing. Stapled and handwritten on spiral notebook paper, the journal details the logistics of a mysterious roadtrip across the US from Georgia to Washington. Despite her attention to finances and mileage, the logs are are not dated with a year, but are believed to document a trip made with her husband, brother-in-law and and sister-in-law…most likely in 1983. The monotonous accounting is accented by observations of the dull colors of landscape and even a rare joke, reflecting the personality of the grandmother I know, the bookkeeper.

Stephanie Sutton is an Assistant Professor of Art at Winthrop University, specializing in photography and time-based media. Through the critical lenses of feminist theory, identity politics, and medical pathologies, her performances for the camera employ conventions of labor and ritual to complicate assumptions of discipline and destabilize virtues of self-control. The subject of several invitational shows, Sutton’s work is recognized for its success in transgressing the limits of the isolated subject and redirecting self-consciousness on to the viewer. Sutton earned her MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, and her BFA in studio art from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University. She lives and works near Rock Hill, South Carolina.