Tear Torn and Oneing, 2022
roses, locks of artist’s hair, butterfly, amaranth, sutures, bells, hide from a deer that the artist witnessed run into a garden fence and die in Brattleboro VT, egg wash, smoke, water, gauze, wood, mirror, vinyl fabric
Can tears be realm splitters? Burrowing a path straight through our beings, straight through the hole left by loss, physically in one plane, love running through to another? Can losses, when shared, wounds bared, be attachment points for an umbilical cord to all other living things? The possibility of the site of the loss/wound/tear transforming into a connecting force?
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich made up the word “oneing,” convinced that everything was interconnected and physically held together by love. She was alive during the bubonic plague, and presumably lost her partner and child. She referred to the divine as mother, nurturer, truly the opposite of the wrathful control tactics of religious institutions of her time. She wrote down the visions she had on her deathbed (she survived the plague) in a book called “Revelations of Divine Love,” the first recorded book written in English by a woman. //In Celtic mythology, banshee women or fairy women were considered to be deer herders, deer being “fairy cattle.” The banshees were also mythical professional mourners, emerging from the woods to weep and foretell the death of a loved one. (shout out to Este Puerta’s beautiful sculpture/instrument ‘Banshee Song’ )// Mythological stories from multiple different cultures tell of femme people shapeshifting into deer as a survival tactic, transforming/disappearing mid chase to continue on in new form. // The way I saw the deer die upon impact against the garden fence, a barrier between its body & enclosed paradise. //Yes I did get to eat the deer, after processing it’s body, a part of my cells now, is every meal just a oneing practice??? The silhouette of the deer is stitched into the rose window, oneing.
