Kiss Me, We’re Dying

materials: surgical masks, gauze, deciduous leaves, discarded texts, pastels, inks & embroidery floss.

Dear survivor,

These articles were first created at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2018. I could not have foreseen the way the work created nearly 2 years prior would anticipate issues that would so mark 2020, a year of unprecedented isolation, catastrophe, grief, and rage. A year of protest. Of masked and unmasked crusades.

The artist statement below was written prior to the outbreak of COVID 19. There is more I mean to mine from this vein. For now, suffice to say: I’m with you.

October, 2020

Dear Earth,

I am thinking of intimacy, frailty and aversion. Vulnerabilities in the body from which we turn away. I am thinking of breaches. Breaches that harm, breaches that heal….

A whistle- blower breaches trust to stop a greater injustice. A locked door breached may free a person trapped inside. Recently my father, underwent emergency bypass surgery. Is a kiss a breach? Failing to, what dis-ease festers?

To employ surgical masks as pages came to me while considering the paradox of such breaches: violent acts whose intent is to save life. The disposable masks are donned to protect, yet also strip the wearer of individuality, obscuring the part of the body by which we most readily identify one another. The mouth eclipsed in this way is indicative of an imbalance of power, vulnerability or poision.

Meanwhile, October. The trees change color, drop their skirts. Falling leaves are an outward sign of an internal shift. The tree prepares for sleep. For a time when it can no longer prepare food. Where I live people flock to collect the prettiest leaves, press them between those of a book.

Unlike the autumn foliage, we often avoid others when they show signs of frailty. I have been guilty of this. At an artist residency last fall, I noticed how frequently people congregated according to age. Our aversion to frailty, vulnerability, aging, dying can lead prematurely to perhaps the greatest loss—that of intimacy.

While the outsides of my masks thickened with scabs of glue and gauze and leaves in various stages of decomposition, I wanted the interiors to hold something intimate but similarly fragmented. I discovered a stack of discarded books. Tearing leaves from those texts, I excised fragments that felt evocative, that would reward the viewer who leaned in for a closer look.

~
The current embodiments of this exploration are an art installation and 10 accordion bound books. Five books fold flat and maybe displayed horizontally. Five are designed to be suspended from the ceiling. For the installation, masks were suspended from nylon thread at varying heights approximating adult heads. Suspension from a single point allows the masks to twist in the air suggesting both leaves mid-fall and missing persons.

It is my hope that the space created by the unoccupied masks invites the viewer to lean in, to consider their own relationship to frailty, aging and mortality, to become gentler with themselves, to foster greater intimacy with others, and dear Earth, with you.

DISCARDED TEXTS:

Graves, Robert. Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1954. First published: Cassell, 1942.

Lahr, John and Jonathan Price. Life Show: How to See Theater in Life and Life in Theatre. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

Musical Instruments Through The Ages. Ed. Anthony Baines. Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1961.

Smiley, Jane. At Paradise Gate. Advance uncorrected proofs. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981.