Mother Bone is one part of a series of pelvis explorations that I began while I was pregnant and thinking about my relationship to my body and time. Our pelvis cradles our intimate histories and creates a portal for our futures. In a year where days and months have somehow blurred together, stood still, and raced ahead all at once, I was left with an opening to consider the deep time of my body and its internal rhythms. My son was born in the fall and I started collecting leaves on our walks for their kinship to a kind of paper bone and skin. Over six months I slowly collaged them together thinking about the turning of a new season for me into motherhood and the fragility I felt during this transition.
For more images click here.
Breath.
Anticipation.
Soap.
In a moment where we wait with bated breath about the direction something might move in. The tension is palpable. How solid and fragile our words and actions are, like soap bubbles, we sit with them until they pop. Leaving traces of their existence behind in the aftermath of their action.
Conjoined Balloon.
Breath.
Accommodation.
The act of speaking begins with an intake of breath; carrying oxygen to the lungs and passing carbon dioxide back out over the tongue. The exhale brings with it our sounds and syllables, floating on the winds of a gas that we, quite literally, need to be removed from our bodies in order to continue to live. That we can so smoothly carry out this act without thinking or worrying about the mixture of nourishing and poisonous gases, giving each their time and space in the shared channel of our throats made me begin to wonder if we allow the same graces in encountering the volume of another’s words.
For more images click here.
Photo documentation by Math Monahan.
Shared Breath.
Glass.
Gravity.
A breathing atlas.
Sometimes we need to still the action so we can trace the pressure back to its most vulnerable points. Reluctant Gravities are an attempt to freeze the exchange of air between participants as they pass breath back and forth between two molten bubbles of glass.
For more images and videos of the process click here.
Photo documentation by Math Monahan.
20 oranges.
2 participants.
1 bowl of water.
1 bar of soap.
Time.
Patience.
To forgive is to grant relief from a burden, be it a person, situation, or event. The act of forgiveness hinges on being able to articulate that space in which the seemingly rigid parts of a situation are suddenly connected by a flexible and yet tenuous understanding between two people. Sometimes this happens in words and sometimes it is expressed silently through our senses and actions towards one another.
In this sculptural performance, two participants share the ritual of peeling and eating 20 oranges with only one hand each while standing inside an intimate space with no doorways or exits. After consuming all twenty oranges they wash one another’s hands in a small basin. Culling from religious ceremonies of breaking bread together or washing away sins, this ritual makes visceral the effort required when engaging in the emotional and psychological act of forgiving.
Ingesting orange after orange the two performers’ hands grew stickier and their bellies swelled. What seemed easy at first, took on an unforeseen weight as they struggled to complete the task before them. Viewers of the work are limited to seeing only the hands of the performers through a small opening in the walls and hearing the sighs, chews, ripping of peels and eventual lathering and rinsing of sticky hands; a view into how something sweet can turn bitter and the complex negotiation of forgiveness.
For more images click here.
In 2014 I was starting to do small gestures that I was thinking about as “personal performances”. Actions I would do alone and sometimes record. I wondered if you could call it a performance if you were the only audience. And what I came to realize was that really I was trying to understand how to sit with things. In this work- Grip- I held my hand in a jar of water until my skin wrinkled. Thinking about the elasticity that our skin provides for changing circumstances. I wondered about situations that were ending for me and thought about the impulse to cut it off, or shut it away.
But when we sit with something we give it space to continually expand until we have stretched it to its capacity. There at the point where it feels like there is nowhere to go, where you are drowning in it, it begins to fold in on itself, to wrinkle. Creating traction where there was none before. Allowing for a better grip on things.
I had a secret to share, but no one to tell.
No one was listening.
So I tried to swallow it, but it sat there.
Calcifying in my mouth.
Until I decided to give it to you.
Can you understand its shape now?
Alginate was spooned into my mouth until it was full, I then began trying to say a secret that had been laying silent. As I spoke, my words were muffled by the obstruction of the hardening alginate, simultaneously giving shape to my desired expression and choking on it.
The resulting alginate mould created a topography of my unsaid words that were then cast in lead crystal glass, creating a translucent relic that could live safely outside of me.
How can we understand one another when language is cut off? What tools are available for sharing the shape of our desires?
For more images click here.
Photo documentation by Math Monahan.
Worry Stone, 2013 - ongoing.
Cast concrete brick bearing the residual skin oil marks created from the repeated rubbing of thumbs in the fashion of a worry stone.
When I was little I used to anxiously twirl my hair into contentious knots all over my head. Because of this, my grandmother gave me a pink worry stone to keep in my pocket. But what happens when your worries are too big for a pocket and the action that was meant to soothe leaves you as physically raw as the emotions?
