A page about hair combing in the Book of Symbols struck me. The act of combing creates aesthetic order. You delouse a demon by combing through its hair but too much combing becomes paradoxical. Excessive combing makes things less orderly. I wanted multiple screens playing to show the obsessive nature of it. There have been a lot of things I have been trying to control lately that resulted in a lack of control.
Aesthetics is a classification within the nine major institutional categories as defined by sociologist William Sumner and anthropologist Albert Keller. These institutions are cages of humanity. We spend a lot of time consciously controlling how things look and how they make us feel. But by doing that we only create more disorder. Just as when you obsessively comb your hair, you end up with knots. Things don’t necessarily look how they are.
(xerox scans and writing components)
Kneeling, picking at the lock for days
my fingertips are bruised and bloody.
My mother comes and lifts me off the ground,
lowering my body into iodine bath.
Every limb disappearing
into opaque brown pool
☆
Going down by the water
for my weekly buoyancy test.
Still too hollow.
Playing a game of chicken with myself
and laughing just a little bit
detail of installation
This summer, I unexpectedly received apologies over text and direct message from four different people for varied reasons for things that had happened (or did not happen) over the last year. Receiving them so suddenly without recent context unsettled me. Whether it’s a temporal gaze or deafening silence, you don’t really know what’s going on in people’s heads. I needed to better understand what it meant.
I recalled “Old Man’s Cloth” by El Anatsui. The concept of the cloth inspired me. When I was little, I would loom little potholders for my mom. Sometimes, I would sew messages on them. I realized it would be meaningful to me now to do a fabric collage on a larger scale.
I then looked at Tracey Emin’s “Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With” and Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Emin radicalizes needle arts. Goldin’s photographs surveille her history. I wanted my piece to express the confusion and dynamics of the apologies.
It seemed like the audience’s expectation might’ve been to include photos. It was the first element I decided not to include. Pictures would “call out” the people. That was not my intent.
I chose the texts that struck me when I got them and stayed on my mind. There were 12 of them. I printed them on fabric using an inkjet printer and underlined the word sorry with a zigzag stitch wherever it appeared. They are placed clockwise in a chronological circle, and hand-stitched using gold embroidery thread, like the reparative gold used in Japanese kintsugi work.
I also included my “stash” of silly sentimental things that they had left behind: a movie ticket to see Mid90s, a box of American Spirits cigarettes, a Gibson guitar pick, a tag written for me on a diner napkin and the warning label from a Juul pod box.
I chose two floral prints for the patchwork. The brown fabric and thread is from a skirt my mom made in home economics in 1979. The pink fabric and green and blue threads were from her grandmother, my great grandmother, who was once a union topstitcher.
The sentimental things are quilted under tulle through the layers of the piece. The tulle is from a ghost costume my mom made me in 2008. The backing is blue batiste. The batting is recycled from plastic bottles.
At times, the process got incredibly frustrating. Pieces were uneven and had to be ripped out. There wasn’t enough room to iron. The metallic embroidery thread was hard to work with. I sliced my arm with the rotary cutter. And reading the texts in giant font was exasperating.
This wax sculpture is a manifestation of every emotion and thought that has not been expressed physically in reference to one person. Where do all of these unsaid things go and what do they form? I can feel them inside of me as if they are a physical thing. I wanted something to represent that manifestation of these thoughts that never came out. When I first started the sculpture, it formed into a ball. I was having a hard time navigating how to not make a crafts project and make it feel more human. Once I created the spine, it evolved into a figure.
The upheaval of emotions I was trying to ignore felt cataclysmic to me. What can these thoughts and feelings do if they are said? I reached a point where the emotions from the other side were expressed to me. But I still never got my thoughts out. The inability to communicate is a cataclysmic symptom of teenhood and fear.
Woodblock prints on various handkerchiefs and kitakata paper. An exploration on theosophical forms and color theory.
