Reflections
Sculpture in progress 2021
I took a break from posting last week. I was out of the studio and concentrating on other things so I have little to report as progress. Maybe it’s a good time to reflect though. Look at how I have gotten here. Why I am making this particular art.
When my mom went into a care home in the fall of 2019, my four year stint of intense care-giving came to an end. I was absolutely utterly exhausted emotionally and physically. I was suddenly living alone for the first time since my college years. It was disorienting. I was residing in a house that wasn’t mine and leading a life I didn’t seem to ask for. The possibilities of what to do next were overwhelmingly endless. I was frozen. It took extreme effort to move one foot in front of the other. Although I felt at the time that I was barely holding on to any art practice, I can see now that I was working towards an idea of what it means to be truly vulnerability. I was noticing where life and vitality survives even amidst the harshest of circumstances. I was just beginning to see how the work I chose to do correlated with the world I was examining. I certainly didn’t have a handle on it then though. I just continued to make art. It was the only thing that made sense.
As the new year, 2020 came into view, I was finally emerging from what seemed to be a long arduous journey. I was feeling ready to embark on something fresh and new. Haha. Little did I know that the real journey was just barely beginning.
Being on lockdown last spring was crushing to the tiny tenuous ladder I had finally built. I know my story is hardly tragic during this time of worldwide health and economic destruction. I was in a safe place. I had my studio. I had time. I felt though, that the air had been taken out of my sails. I felt suffocated and very lonely just at the time I was starting to spread my wings.
If any of you have experienced claustrophobia then you know exactly what I am talking about when I say my world shrunk back to a size I could not fit in. I felt trapped. Lost. Scrambling for normalcy. When I reached out and tried to expose myself online I felt engulfed, not welcomed. Everyone had become an artist and figured out a way to use the internet to their advantage. There was a lot of shaming directed at those who found it hard to work with the clatter inside our heads. And the sadness and grief in the world only intensified as the months dragged on. Jerry Saltz kept saying that now artists had no excuse for not using time wisely. Yet time, for me, was always two steps ahead and I could never catch up.
When the days finally started getting warmer and I was getting outside more, I felt less confined. The panic started subsiding. My microcosmic world started revealing itself to have some answers. Maybe not answers but hints to what I should be honouring and paying attention to. I started writing to further understand what I was making visually. At the end of my days I didn’t seem to be producing much but I definitely seem to be catching up with this ever-illusive time. Moments began to have huge significance. Noticing junctures of thought that existed in the present. Observing details that helped bring things into focus. Having the fortitude to know I wouldn’t lose myself when I scattered to the wind. It is all part of the process. It’s how we gain strength and stay connected. Even in our aloneness.
Now, as of yesterday, I can safely say I have made it through the winter of 2021. The air is once again getting warmer. Even though life continues to be a roller-coaster ride, I feel I have my feet safely on the ground. My work has taken on a significance and has deep meaning for me that I am not sure I could have found otherwise. The journey continues but hopefully I will stand like those pilings against the torrential waves. Steadfast, weathered and wise.