"Conversation Pieces" consists of seven tableaus, each made up of wall-mounted photographs, furniture draped in white fabric, and an artist's book placed on a black wood chair. Viewers become participants in the installation by sitting on the chair and reading the book at each station. The work is based upon conversations between my mother and me during the last years of her life. Enlarged family snapshots and passages from her diaries and letters served as conversation pieces for us and led to the stories in this series of artist's books. The work is about photography and writing and art-making, and their place in our efforts to deny death.