Lately I’ve been playing a game that I call Alternative House in which I rearrange my quickly emptying house in curious and nonsensical assemblages. It’s a waste of time at best but nevertheless has been very entertaining while sorting out the feelings and detritus of the past year of my life.
This house experience started last May with a week long covid isolation and the slow rot of what we’ll call the Project I moved south for. It took months of a deadened feeling and sadness that settled like a throat punch to realize it was ending. I swam in the impossible confusion of trying to communicate with someone who refused to reciprocate. Despite the aching, I lived in a beautiful summer of decay and reveled in a widening view of relationships. As in any living experience gone awry, I learned what I do not want.
According to a friend, my move date falls on the scorpio lunar eclipse which carries the theme of letting go. I don’t know how much I subscribe to moon placements and star charts but at the very least this theme is a good one to chew on.
My task of letting go is a large one—as all my things return to boxes, I am honoring the house and thanking its bones for holding me, my life, and my work for this past year. Though the garden barely had a yield, I am lovingly laying it to rest and composting what I learned for this year’s garden. I am abundantly grateful for the sadness this house held because it makes my happiness now all the more sweet. The Project was a failed experiment, so be it. We learn much more from failure than we do from success. As always I am composting my experiences into writing, like this fragment from Hopeful Remnants:
I could beg for your porcelain forgiveness but it would shatter on a wordless mouth. Everyday we cleaned the kitchen in silence. My tongue was returned to me bloody and you asked me how to mourn.
Grief & Mourning
In the process of leaving this house, I am also thinking of ways to visually represent grief and that throat-punch feeling within my work. I have been making embroidered poems for two years now, especially in times of heightened emotion. I’m usually calm by the end because they take so long to finish. For a long while, I have been thinking of a large blue quilt that incorporates this kind of writing. I have a big sheet to use as a blank setting for these vignettes. I expect there will be a lot more embroidery of letters and lines in the coming months as I unpack (literally, emotionally, etc).
In order to complete this work, I need to get on my screen printing game which has been a goal of mine for a while. To access the tools (and time) to do this, I feel like I have to go to grad school. Unfortunately in the two months in which I have been actively trying to do this, I have been straight up ghosted by the University.
My intention is to make myself a program to research textile history as it intertwines with community and labor. Ah ha—back on topic for my newsletter!
If all goes well, I hope to turn this newsletter into a place to share my current research. But until the University opens the doors I’ve been banging on and I finish moving, you are stuck with my emotive reflections.
Changing forever,