Arm Vein Detail
Chest Vein
Wrist Detail
Knee Detail
Skull Detail
Skull Sampler
Knee Sampler
Rib Cage Sampler
Pelvis Sampler
Installation
My grandmother passed away this fall. We had received the phone calls, the emails, the letters. In theory, I was expecting her death, but I was not prepared for my reaction to it. Instead of mourning, I hoarded. Things that were not important during her lifetime suddenly became excruciatingly dear to me. It became essential for me to keep her old socks, her gloves, her shirts that I had never seen her wear. I needed to physically hold on to her.
What do we leave behind when we die? This question plagues me. I sit around wondering about it, warm in my grandmother’s wool socks, aware of the time passing because of her watch on my wrist. This question was born originally out of the change that has become so constant in the last four years of my life. After living in the same house for thirteen years, I suddenly became nomadic: four years, eight homes. Just as my world shifted when my grandmother died, my departure from each place has been a real and dramatic change. Home and the self have been the variables; my body, the constant.
I am interested in the corporal. I miss my grandmother’s bodily presence, and it is my own physical being that carries me from place to place. The act of sewing has become a way to preserve my body in order to ensure that I have something to pass on when I pass on. Craft evokes feelings of familiarity and homecoming; anatomical drawings produce the opposite: sterility, unfamiliarity, alienation from the physical self. By combining the two, I am creating nostalgia for the physical body.
No comments:
Post a Comment