A Different Kind of Keeper

“I’m just in total awe,” says Sally Snowman. The recently retired keeper of Boston Light stands at the top of the lighthouse in an interview captured by artist Jessica Mallios. “You see all the prism colors, and it’s rotating, and it’s catching the light from different spaces. So talk about a study of light.” The clip plays as a part of the artist’s three-channel video piece on display in “Signaling Light.” 

Snowman gestures to the impressively constructed light, telling the camera that it has a personality – one she’s gotten to know through years of delicate cleaning and care, exhaustive hands-on maintenance at odds with our contemporary age of technological immediacy and labor alienation.

Mallios honors the gendered connection between object and steward, labor and laborer, light and society in three mediums: one, an asynchronous multi-channel film compiled over five years of interviews with women lighthouse keepers and their descendants; two, worn charcoal rubbings of spiral stair treads found within the round structures; three, several archival documents attesting to the lighthouse keepers’ livelihoods. The exhibit bears a pronounced attention to detail and an experimental approach to remembrance and record-keeping that feels in line with its distinct subject matter. 

Within the gallery at Women & Their Work, these coexisting mediums are displayed with a keen eye toward the panoptic feeling of being in a lighthouse and the ruggedness of the life that surrounds this soon-to-be-forgotten, much-romanticized occupation.

The exhibit first introduces the charcoal rubbings, displayed in glassless frames. Well-worn white paper bears wrinkles and process marks including the artist’s smudged fingerprints and hints of shoe treads, which nearly disappear in the nearby gelatin prints pulled from the rubbings. These inversely colored white-on-black renditions, displayed beside the original rubbings, yield imperfections of their own from the printing process and recall the repetitive nature of tending to a lighthouse, practically exemplified by the nauseating ascent and descent of these spiral stairs. Each print is dedicated to a different woman who traversed such stairs many times a day in her work maintaining a lighthouse.

In one of the videos in the next room, we watch a baseball-capped Mallios scrape charcoal across the pages, slowly drawing the shape of the metal steps to the surface. She moves aside occasionally for pedestrians to climb past, their sneaker soles pressing the nails and lattice pattern deeper into the artist’s paper. Once they’ve gone, she bends to the stairs again, re-anointing the paper with more dark dust. 

Perpendicular to this repetitive loop, a fabric wall stretches across the gallery in a semicircle, cutting the room nearly in two and boxing the viewer into a cozy, near-claustrophobic spherical space. Two portholes are projected on this temporary wall, visible from either side. One watches an endless, undulating sea. The other alternates between viewpoints: the eaves of the neighboring home, a lightly trafficked sidewalk, a line of trees separating the tower from the water. 

We find Snowman, and documents of the other women lighthouse keepers, in the third, most prominently projected video. Weathered brick exteriors and homely interiors, picturesque waves and craggy shorelines fill the screen as the daughters and granddaughters of America’s women lighthouse keepers recount their matriarchs’ stories. In chorus with Snowman, they recall a life lived in a series of concentric circles; self-sustaining work governed by the seasons and centered around the unending maintenance of the rotating light.

“I like the term keepers, because women are such keepers, whether it’s keeping the light burning or keeping the family together and alive or keeping stories going,” the granddaughter of Maine’s Eagle Island keeper, Lucy Ball, reflects in a voiceover.

These women were few among many men in the field, and faced discrimination and underestimation from the government who employed them and, often, the husbands who worked beside them. Their legacy, preserved in the historical documents on display and the artwork created around them, is one of resilient vigilance. Sitting on the bench before Mallios’ documentary-style footage, that legacy is palpable. The room’s panoramic structure compels viewers to keep glancing over their shoulder at the other projected views unfolding, imparting the creeping sensation of work to be done just out of sight. 

A Texan lighthouse, Port Isabel, makes its way into the film. Once tended by Harriet Gill and, later, Hannah Ham, the publicly accessible white tower is now a museum. In Mallios’ shot, LED lights dwarf its brightness and render it useless and placeless, a last vestige of a different time amid a bustling tourist strip. “Signaling Light” returns these hallowed, outdated tools to their peculiar, scrupulous pasts, combining visual techniques to replicate a sensorial experience of history. 

This article appears in January 30 • 2026.