Week 11: Splinter
As we near 3 months in solitude for some of us, the "how are you feeling?" and "how you holding up?" questions only serve to highlight the cracks we have formed over this time. Though many connections have been rekindled in quarantine, friendships, relationships to our jobs, and understanding of ourselves have in many ways fractured. However, just as the Japanese art of Kintsugi calls attention to the preciousness of scars, we must emerge broken- not as something to hide, but to display with pride.
With Guest Curator Liezel Strauss
Click photos below to see more detail.
What are your cracks, scars, and fragments that are showing up, and how can you view these changes as positive, affirming or beautiful?
Rachelle Beaudoin: The cracks are definitely appearing now as everything is wearing thin and feeling so lived in. This is forcing conversations and making some of the invisible labor at home visible to my partner and family. As difficult as it is, in a funny way, this is affirming. This is a video I shot last year and didn’t touch until now. I was able to pick it up and look at it differently and see progress and healing. When I came back to it, I decided to slow it down and make it a loop which feels appropriate now.
Anna Wallace: Just before the quarantine I lost my first pregnancy. During these last few months I have experienced the fragmentation of grief and loss and hope and lots of waiting. I began making these small quilted paintings as a way to gather all of these splinters and manifest a small kind of offering to myself and the rest of the world. What is beautiful about loss is that it connects you with others who have experienced that same loss. There is an affirmation in finding this community and a knowledge that having experienced something very difficult you can help others and grieve collectively.
Nora Howell: I want work, parenting, art-making, keeping the house clean... I want it to be smooth! I want things to work as I have planned them in my head, with minimal change. I have always been ten steps behind the ideal Nora Howell that exists in my mind. The pursuit of perfection, the aspiration. I want to say with confidence and sincereness that through it all, I see the beauty in myself despite falling short. I want to say with conviction that the love from my family, my children gives me the courage to push through my insecurities and imperfections with affirmation and beauty. However, that would be a stretch. I feel my scars, fragments, and cracks intensely in this time of quarantine and social distancing. I do have hope. I can look back when I made ‘Self Portrait’ preparing for labor for the second time, terrified, scared from my first labor experience. I can share now with pride that I made it through labor the second time, a VBAC, and probably the most significant experience of my life. In hindsight, I can see the beauty of working through all of my fear, the process, the work I put into those months of preparing to give birth. On the other side of it, looking back, it was beautiful.
Amy Ayanda Lester: Time is always something I struggle with, there is never enough. Yet I find myself finding more time to slow down and do less during this National Lockdown. They have encouraged us to be home as much as possible, so we are forced to slow down. I lose time often through the cracks, but I am making more time by slowing down; slowing down as an art practice in itself. I find the quiet moments affirming that everything will be ok, that life goes on and that we will survive.
Zarrin Maani: It’s always scary for me to begin a painting. I struggle with being OK with things not always turning out the way I envisioned it. I have an inner critic that tells me that my art isn’t good enough because I wasn’t formally trained, that it’s not what “real” art looks like, etc. With COVID-19, dramatic changes are happening in our individual and collective lives. Changes are occurring that we cannot control. Much like the struggle I have with my art, this year is looking a lot different than I envisioned, and yet I adapt, I change courses, and sometimes I let go. It’s a wonderful lesson that I’m learning to apply in my creative life as well.
Vanessa Hall-Patch: I entered isolation determined to find stability and balance between (remote) full-time work, homeschooling two kids, my art practice and family life. A sense of normalcy felt essential, yet nearly impossible to achieve under these new conditions. Over time, I have discovered that I may not reach balance with schedules and structure, but by embracing the flow of the day-to-day. As isolation continues, and cracks form, I strive to shift my attention to the beauty of being somewhat released from time.
Brittney Denham-Whisonant: There are too many to name! I think House/Home #1 highlights the cracks that show up while navigating the complexities of motherhood. Complexities such as: how to pass traditions, constructing “home” or a safe place, navigating all-nighters, growth charts, feeding schedules, all while trying to reconcile an identity crisis trying to be a mother and artist. House/Home #1 walks that fine line between looking fragile due to the fragmented state of the constructed home, but also the strength of the icon of a house. I believe these changes are positive in a plethora of ways. There is bodily strength of being a child’s home for 9 months is beautiful. Being able to have the capacity to care for another human so deeply and on a countless amount of levels is beautiful.
Madeleine Lemieux: The hardest part of learning to be a mother was to align notions of ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’ with the painful, torn-up, full of emotional ups and downs reality of my first years of parenting. I am changed, through breaking and reforming - like bones or kintsugi (the art of repairing ceramics with gold) - the scars remain, and add their own history and beauty to the object. This piece is a study of how to take the pieces of a thing and reform them into a new object, that requires its own way of looking, to find its beauty.
Twiggy Boyer: Isolation and staying at home--although always moving and being busy with art and taking care of my daughter-- has made space for a lot of thinking. This time of quarantine has opened up many cracks that I thought I had sealed away. Fragments and recollections resurfacing, opening of scars I thought were healed, all magnified by the act of social isolation. The beauty (and pain) in this is forcing me to look deeper within me, ultimately pushing boundaries within my work, as a mother and allowing me to shift and grow tremendously. I see this as a beautiful reconnection.