on the wing of a bird

I've been in the studio again the last few days, practicing making things from the remnants of what's been broken. I am gearing up for a new body of work that is eliciting that tingling feeling in my fingertips, the one that makes everything feel brighter and better... and, you know, possible. I have an installation/performance in the works for next year that's rapidly tumbling and growing into an event I'm pretty damn excited about. There will be more details to come, but in the meantime, here is a detail of the wing of a bird in flight painstakingly constructed from shards of things that were once whole, things I have loved, believed, things that had to be broken in order to take flight:

Nourishment

The haze of the holidays is finally lifting, and today there was a small peak of sun. My mind has been filled, mostly, with the personal and mundane: shifting objects and patterns to make space in this home for another person, making meals, hibernating, gestating art ideas, feeling the rumblings of spring's imminence. I've spent some time out shooting with my new camera, and making things from what I find. Always. There is always that. The what do I make of it in my life. That's been focused on film for a time, and, suddenly, food.

I have become obsessed with food. Where art blogs once sat, food blogs. Afternoons in the studio have become afternoons in the kitchen. Maybe it's the comfy feeling of sharing my home with the man I love; maybe it's the hibernation of winter, but maybe there is something else here too. Nourishment. It's a word that has flashed across the screen more than once over recent years. What do we do to nourish ourselves, each other? What feeds us?

For the first few weeks of this month we did a bit of a cleanse, and every time I drank a jewel-colored glass of carrot ginger beet parsley juice (or whatever the combo of the day), I felt it. I felt a tingling rush into my body of nourishment. I feel it too in conversations with good friends with whom deep and true understanding is shared. I feel it when I witness someone in power speaking the truth, or when I see someone without power respected, honored. It's not as present as it ought to be in our world. And I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, a palpable presence in my world. Wholesome food, love, connection, kinship... what nourishes you?

(Inter)Action and Artmaking

As my artwork has expanded beyond gallery walls, as the frames have fallen away, unsurprisingly lots of questions have arisen. Many from within me, and many from curious friends and onlookers.

The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.

Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.

And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.

But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.

So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)

Art is in the action, the interaction.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.

So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.

Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.

Life and Death in America

It has been an exhausting few days, full of alternating panic and gratitude, fear and faith, and all of the hairpin turns of days spent in hospital waiting rooms.

On Wednesday, at least three years ago now—or according to my calendar, 3 days—I spent the day glued to my computer watching the proceedings of Georgia Death Row Inmate, Troy Davis. Despite mounting evidence of his innocence, his execution was set for 7pm local time. I watched as hours ticked by, waiting on final word from the US Supreme Court. 7:10, 7:40, 8:15... each moment the tension mounted, each moment greater hope, greater fear among the family members, friends, and supporters gathered outside the prison. Then they announced that the Supreme Court had denied the stay of execution. Davis was going to be killed.

14 minutes pass.

I alternate between pacing in frustration, anger and sadness, and watching the events to continue to unfold on the livestream from Georgia.

Then my phone rings and I am shaken completely from this grieving and plunged into a familiar and unwelcome terror.  It's my father. He's in the hospital. He's had a heart attack, and is going into surgery in the morning.

What follows is a blur, but once the surgery is finished and I see my father again with my own two eyes, my thoughts begin to return to Troy Davis, to see-saw from my presence in the critical care unit to my anger at our communal choices. We, America, killed a likely innocent man. The miscarriage of justice is abominable, the humanitarian considerations are too much for me to even approach in my current state. But our priorities, as a community, as a country, are where my heart goes.

Estimates vary widely, but taxpayers paid from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to execute Davis.

As my father lies in his hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery, you know what he's worried about? How he'll pay his medical expenses.

Lecture after lecture from the nurses about stress, and he's sent home with prescriptions for drugs he cannot afford, a bill for surgery and hospital stay that's astronomical. And he's not one of the innumerable Americans who's uninsured. No, it's just the above-and-beyond costs, the medications that aren't covered, the deductible, the percentage of costs.

And I am angry. Livid. My mind keeps wanting to get an exact number for how much we've chosen to spend to kill someone, when we won't collectively keep each other well. Punishment is prioritized over wellness; death takes precedence over life.

When we'd rather kill someone in pure vengeance than support the health of our people, pardon my language, but our priorities as a country are royally fucked.

Wendell Berry on Conserving Communities

Wendell Berry's works, both in the field and on the page, have always had a special place in my heart.

If there were ever words to live by, here they are...

If the members of a local Community want their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, these are some things they would do:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalized. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

--Wendell Berry, from Another Turn of the Crank

Waves of Gratitude

I've been feeling waves of gratitude the past few days, been feeling them building for the past weeks. Things are shifting over here, over here with my sailboat heart. My apartment is amidst another turnover and I chopped off all of my hair again. Both of which, if you know me, you know means something regarding internal structures, as well. I've just finished my MFA portfolio, Structures of Hope, which was accepted (with even some accolades), much to my delight and relief. Which means graduation and looking for work, and figuring out what life has in store for me next. So, new and exciting things are afoot.

There's also been hard change. My uncle passed unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago. The renewed and deeper contact with family is a major source of those waves of gratitude. I've been feeling a lot of love, and really feeling the connections that span miles, the threads of how our hearts are entwined with one another. It's hard, though, to know what to do for my cousins who have lost their father, or for my own father, for whom I feel so much love that it sometimes catches in my throat when I hear his grief. This week he experienced another episode of heart trouble. He had a major heart attack a few years back, a smaller one a few months ago, and now this, whatever this undefined thing is. He seems fine. But the news sounds like a clock ticking in my ear. It makes my gut knot up thinking about how unready I am to lose him. I've come close with both of my parents, but somehow they're still here. I feel some guilt of privilege, knowing that it's pretty much a lottery, but I'm not dumb enough to let it overshadow the deep gratitude I feel for the fact that they are still here.

With my mother it's understood. She's always been able to read my mind. She knows my heart; I know hers. But with my father it's different. Sometimes I think he doesn't know how important he is to me, how the very roots of my life are entangled with his, how much I still need my father, how much I still need him. I want to figure out how to put it on paper, draw a key to the map so he can see it, so he can read it by the light of day, return to it at any hour. I feel an urgency to give him something to hold in his hands, something that makes it concrete. I want to know that he knows.

The waves of gratitude are changing the shore. I feel it. I feel expanded. I feel love.

And my man with the tugboat heart, I'm deeply grateful for him too, for his countless hours of cheering me through the portfolio over the past months, his hours of sitting with me, listening to me, loving me. At times his kindness and graciousness overwhelms me. We're building a way of loving each other that feels... well, I'm at a loss for words to describe it. It's good, and whole, and wide.

This is all just a tiny thank you note to the world, and to you.

I'm spending my morning at my boyfriend's sweet little apartment on the outskirts of the city. It's in one of those rural little bubbles amidst concrete and stripmall—a vibrant thrum of greenspace, birdcall, tall flowering trees, climbing ivy, and garden beds tucked into the cultivated mind-numbing monotone of suburbia. I've been thinking, since yesterday, about Virginia, about picking up and starting a whole new life there, or anywhere, really—anywhere with rolling hills and lush greenery, anywhere I can put my hands in the dirt and my heart has room to unfurl.

Life is but a blink.

This weekend I lost my uncle unexpectedly, though it doesn't feel right to say it that way, to claim any rights to grieving. I didn't lose him like my cousins lost their father, like my father lost his brother. What I feel is but a sliver.

We spent the morning yesterday sharing stories of his life, of how he didn't waste his time here. He did a lot and he did it with gusto. He took pleasure in shaking people up a little, making them take themselves a little less seriously. Longtime friends joked that the classic Hank-ism was Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. My delicate sensibilities balked for a moment at that one (because sometimes, frankly, I can't) but only for a moment, because true enough, that just about covered it. He lived, and he didn't let anybody get in his way.

I need a little more of that in me.

So why not move to Virginia? Or France? Or anywhere else my heart calls out for? Why not stand in the middle of a crowd and make a fool of myself? Why not unabashedly break all the rules? Who cares about failure? Who cares if it all breaks down? If there's anything to be learned it's that it will... regardless.

I don't want to spend one more day in a dark room talking about what we're going to, worrying through all the details.

Here's our chance. Here's my chance.

Let's do it to honor Hank. Let's live.