roses, bleeding hearts, double yolk egg shell from yundwell farm, embalming thread, bells, mother’s ultrasound, daisy, vinyl fabric, resin, foxgloves from the Black Forest, wood, ink, 38 x 1 x 35 in
Concerned about/yearning/longing for something /someone/some place connected to me but not totally here since womb 1992.
Complete connection, non separation from another (that is paradise)? The womb, the garden, the egg shell-a rupture in enclosed paradise. Longing/desire for another place, for a return-finding that in our own bodies, spiders spin their homes from the inside out.
How to be connected to someone/something that is also entirely unknown. Simultaneous intimacy and mystery.
Thinking about how there’s no grief without desire or love. Can grief even exist without desire? Desire for the physical proximity of someone you’ve lost, desire for the world to be different, desire for what could’ve been or for what is not yet here. Known & close enough for you to imagine but not fully experience, instead the feeling causing you to stretch and sew across the distance between, like being led through a room in the dark. At least the feeling itself can be fully known, connection to absence as proof of life.
How my mom grieved and birthed at the same time.
(Thinking abt my womb twin clearly, but also my sister Jackie who I lost when she was in college, almost 9 years ago). ~~~I can feel the indent of your big toe in the shoes left in your closet, I run my fingers over the sole like a holy braille and remember we are the same size. I stitch around the rose, around the perimeter of your absence, to know its shape, to try to keep it in place. Wendy sewing Peter Pans shadow, impossible to keep. ~~~
