Marking Time: Art on Teabags

At home during New York’s shelter-at-home orders, I thought about the myriad lived stories world-wide during this pandemic. I wondered what I would remember and hold onto from these difficult months. I thought about what connects us to one another.

Puttering in my studio I sort through bags of collected ephemera. Objects that resonate, evoking memories of people, places, and experiences. Cocoons dyed with oak gall ink, tea and coffee, salvaged teabags from the dying. Birds’ nests, thorns, eggshells and vintage dress patterns and sheet music; browned and brittle with evocative discoloration reminiscent of watercolor. Empty weed pods, rusty metal pieces, burned scraps of paper. I layer and collage materials onto tiny tea bag canvases, then stitch and pierce with thread and thorns. They are daily meditations, composing and reclaiming memory and personal history brought into my current experience. It is reparative, healing and acts as a psychological and emotional anchor in tumultuous times. I find meaning through the making.

I planned to do one for each day in lock-down. As weeks unfurled, and the outside world became more chaotic and intrusive, I decided to continue these until I am vaccinated and able to visit loved ones without anxiety. I collage and stitch in a stubborn insistence of hope, a resistance to fear, and in the knowledge that this too shall pass. Using what is on hand, making do. I become aware of an inner refrain as I create. I am here. As witness, as attestant. I am still here.

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COVID Cost

As the pandemic raged on and I was bombarded with the numbers and the headlines screaming at me I tried to grapple with the severity and sheer number impacted. For days there were over 1000 deaths a day in New York alone and freezer cadaver trucks parked near the hospitals in New York City. Images of dazed, exhausted, suited-up healthcare workers reminiscent of those portrayed in Hollywood movies, the modern day armor in a physical battle to thwart death. In addition, behind each of these deaths, were many other lives impacted: family, friends, loved ones and colleagues unable to mourn and grieve in person or with one another. The ragged holes torn into all of these lives. How do I make sense of these overwhelming and mind boggling numbers?

Continuing from other burning projects I had done, I decided to mark each death in New York State with a burnt mark on a sheet of handmade abaca paper. Abaca is a translucent skin-like paper. Each 18 x 15 inch sheet contains 650 to 700 unique burn marks. Currently it will require over 115 sheets to commemorate the over over 72,690 lives lost. I imagine them hung side to side across lengths of wall or papering a full wall. Pinned a short distance from the wall, allowing them to flutter in the air currents, the cast shadows signifying the loss and making visual the presence of absence. I will be burning until the death toll ceases.

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Emergence

I began on a small scale, dying silk cocoons and experimenting with stitching them together. I dyed them with tea, coffee, oak gall, sunflower and walnut inks. Initially to me, the cocoons referenced new life, as well as the remains of a home that has been emptied or abandoned. It was a circumscribed piece sitting comfortably on a small section of the wall. Yet I felt compelled to add more and more. The piece became emblematic of so much pressing on me from the outside world: the insidious spread of the Covid-19 virus, misinformation and lies, fear and the mapping of civil rights causes and populations. The pandemic intensified and worsened, the political upheaval in this country ignited and I imagined the piece traveling from the ceiling, across the wall and down and seeping onto the floor. Simultaneously its possible meanings multiplied: referencing the wave of optimism as a new administration took office, the gradual availability of first one, then two, then three vaccines across the country, a mapping of the myriad of lives connected to one another and yet separate during a global event, the recognition that viruses, fears, misunderstandings and hope are all transmitted by us, between one another. Beautiful, discomfiting, textured. Benevolent or sinister depending on what it is thought to be and how it is perceived. A push-pull between wanting to stroke the velvety textures and being repulsed by the thought of the larvae they contained. I invite viewers to fill in their own narratives.

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Overwritten: 1461 Days of the Trump Administration

Overwritten was created in response to the Trump presidency. Each day I was bombarded by an increasing number of lies, obfuscations and derision for and denial of fact, science, medical expertise and knowledge. Basic humanity, honesty, kindness and responsibility towards those with less visibility, voice, access and means was scoffed at and labeled as weakness. I chose a medical textbook, which at one time would be used to educate and systematically burned a page for each day the Trump administration held office. What remains appears to be a sort of code or language that both destroys the existing information while replacing it with a nonsensical, unreadable and destructive text.

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Nests (working title)

Nests carry rich associations with comfort, safety, security, and nurture. They are associated with home as both an idea and refuge. I imagine birds tucked in, warm and protected within from the elements. Ironically, birds only use the nests from egg laying until the babies fledge. Adult birds roost in trees, crevices and building eaves…but not in those beautifully built nests.

I started thinking about the ideas of domestication, and the conflicting cultural expectations and norms for women. Culturally, women are expected to put others' needs ahead of their own(children, parents, spouse). They are expected to provide a safe, nurturing space for those around them, while not asking for much themselves. They need to be tough, strong, resilient yet are labeled whiny, bitchy, angry, shrill - even when making ‘appropriate demands.’ It is a tightrope that women walk. It takes powerful inner strength and resilience to hold on to oneself and one’s own identity outside of being societies caretakers.