My stomach fills with unease. My head slips into a foggy dissociation. My eyes linger on anything in the distance, worth distracting, and my mouth yearns for water as if that will help clear the mind and get the words out. My breath makes an uneasy sigh as the logic in my head grows curious of how something so simple can create such a physical response.
As children my siblings and I were often told to go play outside. We went on annual family camping trips. To lakes, oceans, and mountains. It was in these places I found solace and meditation. Going barefoot. Filling my body with the senses of touch, smell, shout. The surroundings swallow the echo. I was allowed to be and feel anything here. I was distracted from the real world anxieties that coursed through my nervous little body, even at a young age.
As I pull into and unlock the Cedar Point Biological Station gate, my phone starts going out of service. The days go on, and I find myself experiencing the same elation and freedom that I had camping as a child. But I’m older now, and the relationships back home slowly start sneaking their way into the forefront of my mind. Poking, pushing, scratching. To make sense of it all I distract myself with impossible tasks. Pull all of the weeds outside the front gate (I barely make a dent). Pick all the thistle flowers in the ravine (their season ends before I can harvest them all.) With these tasks I’m able to stall the thoughts seeping back, as labor and the vastness of these fields engulfs me.
In “Thistle Blanket,” I individually sewed thistle flowers with fabric thread onto a coffee sack. The idea that something so soft to touch, does the exact opposite. In the original iteration of this piece I wear the blanket. The thistles poking into my back through the coffee sack. To the viewer all is fine, but the participant is scratched, prioritizing camouflage over comfort. With “Root Bales,” I truly let my anxiety take over. Repeating a series of tasks. Pulling the roots from the ground, cutting the stems, and finally, pushing the roots through the gridded wire. Over and over and over again. The hanging weavings of weeds titled, “Far Away,” have the same desperate need to create unity and structure from something that used to invade.
In the work, I evaluate my own need to create and make sense out of relationships, and the corresponding habits formed within/during them. Relationships that have circled back time and time again, only to yield the same results. Myself, engaging in the same behavior that put me there. The weavings offer a pause. Their deterioration signifies moving on. While their remnants dirty the floor. Even in the midst of moving on, I find new weeds to pull. The new relationships stack and weave into the old ones, that still manage to keep their shape and remain. Never truly moving on. Always in between.