Collected II Ash lumber, LED lights, frosted Plexiglass, tracing paper, menstrual blood Variable size, usually 14’ x 7’ (four 6’ x 14” light boxes) 2020
Philosopher Alan Watts said, “Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is, in other words, no such thing as time in the natural world. [. . .] There is such a thing as rhythm. The rhythm of tides; the rhythm of biological processes. . . But time as such is a social institution, in the same way that language is, that number is, that concepts are, and all measurements [. . .] inches, meters, the lines of latitude and longitudes. All those things are social institutions or conventions . . . the word convention, from the Latin conven to come together, to agree about something [. . ..] In the natural physical world, there is rhythm and there is motion. And time, then, obviously, is a way of measuring motion, by comparing motion with some sort of constant. Now the constant in the question of time is a circle marked out in 360 degrees. And that is time. We cause a hand, a pointer, to revolve around that circle at a regular speed, and that gives us a constant with which we compare all kinds of motions and rhythms. And so, the clock is just like a ruler and just as abstract.”
In 2016 it somehow occurred to me that my mother’s health was declining. I intuitively felt that she would not live more than three years. What I did not predict is that my husband during this same time would injure his neck and that my father would be diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Collected consists of paintings and a sculpture which supports the paintings. The paintings are made using my menstrual blood, a material which signifies loss, even while it is needed for life. Making the paintings and measuring my biological rhythm in this way was a grounding action which tethered me to routine, and so to some sense of normalcy, during a chaotic period of my life when pain and loss prevailed. Through the regular appearance of this organic material, I was tethered to standardized time. When moisture from my menstrual blood touches tracing paper, the paper forms a new shape. The water soaks in, then evaporates, causing it to pull, ripple, distort.
Meditation on my body and its relationship to time, a practice I recognized as meditative only through reflection, was a way to focus inward and silence the chaos that spun around me in the external world. I refer to my paintings as “blood circles,” although to say that each painting is a round shape would be more accurate. Each painting is unique and there is no fixed point in the center from which the edges are equidistant. They could be described as a freehanded attempt at a circle—an attempt to find a fixed center. Some of the lines that create the circles are thick, some so thin that they are nearly invisible. Some include tissue along with blood. The process of making these paintings was a meditative practice that tethered and grounded me to the present while also facilitating a deep reflection on my relationship to family.
The blood circle paintings reference time, family, loss, and renewal. Collected I was a thirty-two-foot light table that stood thirty-six inches high and was formed in the shape of the lifeline on my right hand. Blood circle paintings were stacked on the lighted surface of the table, one representing each menstrual cycle I have had in my life to the date of the given exhibition. In this first version, the table was raw and heavy, reflecting the grief present in my body, the grief occupying my mind. The light table was made from the logs of an ash tree, felled by my cousin from the land he now owns and works—the same land my mother grew up on; the same farm she worked and helped build with her parents and siblings. On the day it was cut, my husband and I drove the wood to a local mill, where it was transformed, still wet, from logs into boards.
Working the wood while it was green made curving the wood easy but added unknown variables to the project, such as unpredictable shrinkage and contortion as the wood dried and water evaporated. In addition to embracing the unknown, green wood was selected for the duality of its meaning. Calling something green is slang for saying it is young or inexperienced, yet wood is green when it is the opposite: freshly cut, now dead. Green wood can be any age, any level of experience or wisdom. It can have weathered any number of storms. No matter which point on the line of linear time the tree is cut down, it is green—it becomes young again—a parallel for me to the life-cycle of humans who return to a child-like state before a natural death.
As time passed, my feelings of nearly drowning in grief shifted. I build a new version, Collected II, to represent this shift. This time four separate boxes represent the four griefs I was dealing with during this time, losses that I continue to feel, but differently as time moves on—each now with its own space, yet still attached to each other.
Mourning, mourning, mourning, mourning.
My father’s sickness and death,
The sickness and death of my mother,
The loss of the children I will not birth,
And the passing of my youth.
Looking, to study.
Words unspoken,
Actions not taken
And time that has already passed.
My thoughts circle with each cycle.
Collecting time to recollect, meditate,
Dissolve the mystery, curve the wall, let space in,
And grasp the months just passed.
To gather, to hold, to let go
Of the years that are not coming back.
My body keeps time with blood
And it does not apologize.
It comes without permission or consideration—
This biological rhythm
A lifeline in my grief
And I want you to see it.