Surrendering


I returned from a month in southern Italy recently, where I spent time at Domus Artist Residency. This was transformative for my practice. The time out to think deeply, and concentrate without the pressure of having to stop and put down my idea, just because of the time of day, was incredible. There was no requirement for an outcome, but I did have a loose framework for working on something that had been needling me for a long time about my maternal line. I took the blanket with text (see below), and archive photographs with which I began to make drawings.

The house was in the old part of Galatina, a town full of baroque architecture and a long history of tarantism. The women who danced to rid themselves of some sort of mania after being bitten by a spider is long documented and I felt an affinity with these pictures as much as I felt they were problematic. My own story continually returns to the impact of how we treat women who are individually sad butting up against how this is collectively represented: through the archive, through the institution and through culture. I drew. I filmed vignettes on the roof. I sewed. I surrendered to being there. It was a surrender.