Image by Elizabeth Palace Photography
And there I was, the night before my opening, everything more than ready, yet unable to sleep.
I couldn't stop (over)thinking about last year's SPEED KILLS exhibit, how bottomed out I was after finishing that installation, and how much grief and longing it had carried. The familiar, yet still bizarre, feeling of unrest was resurfacing, prompting incomplete answers to my own punishing questions:
Where do I go from here? No idea.
Is my practice the way I make meaning now? Maybe.
Is making art the way I know myself? How I relate to the world around me? Perhaps.
Is "the process" my way of processing? Possibly.
I missed the birds.
With SPEED KILLS, I was moving through something that had already happened: the first 47 years of my life and the way they abruptly ended with my mother's passing. With ALL MY FRIENDS ARE BIRDS, I was moving through (and still am) grief for something that had/has not happened yet. My body seemed to recognize it before I did, anticipating the loss by beginning to create, preemptively.
So does this make my work, very specifically, the way my body has learned to safely process grief?
A few days later, even after the show's successful opening, the sleepless inquiries didn't cease.
I scanned the night's memories for answers and realized that this particular brand of emptiness is very connected to loss, but not necessarily a loss that is sad or lonely.
It's completion.
And completion, when tied to achievement, feels very good. But at the same time, it can also feel hauntingly shallow.
And then it hit me.
The woman I was before the process, before the work, before the birds is, just like the girl I was before SPEED KILLS, gone. The grief that comes from saying goodbye to that somewhat short-lived version of myself is real and familiar, as is the discomfort of the unknown in front of me.
It's the familiarity of it all that fills me with anxiety. The knowing of exactly what to expect, of what's coming. Every time the post-project up-level presents itself, my life becomes bigger, more expansive. But you know what else gets bigger? The risk, the exposure, the emotions, the vulnerability, and the payoff.
After two major projects, I have come to understand: the work keeps me safe.
With both installations, when collapse felt imminent, especially near deadlines, and when I was going through intense personal rupture, the birds, the mother wounds, the stories I was writing, it all kept me safe. It kept me busy, engaged, grounded, contained, and protected in a way that nothing in the outside world ever could or ever has.
Curious, I revisit my childhood dream of being an artist. The romantic idea of the solitude that comes with living the “artist life” I’d learned from books and movies. The fantasy that something created by me could affect a viewer forever.
Clichés are clichés for a reason, but no cliché prepared me for bringing the work out into the world, outside my room, outside my studio. Nothing warned me that my safety net would disappear, or that the urgent, almost self-indulgent craving to begin again would arrive before the project was even finished.
That, my friends, is how the birds came to be.
They were solace from something I hadn't quite finished, but had already started moving inside me, winking at me from over the finish line. It was pure escapism; a need that turned into a want.
Image courtesy of MTN Space Gallery
Installed neatly in the gallery, my 22 bird amigos, like their mistress, are in transition. They are ready to leave the nest and be adopted into loving homes. Our time together was never permanent, and neither was the woman who made them.
I took a year to finish my bird portraits, a period littered with feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and confusion. It was also a time for joy, romance, love, and lots of movement. I call it “the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.”
During this time, I saw the actual living bird subjects daily and developed relationships with them, and they with me. Everything around AMFAB became a meditation. The painting, the research, the hunt for the next. It was all a quiet way to keep breathing, to keep moving forward.
And then it stopped. Not gradually, but with a halt. And with it, my daily practice of observation, repetition, of the obsessive study of something until you know too much.
Completion.
At this newfound point of departure: another heaping side of grief.
The grief this year tastes different. It's seasoned, older, cured. It's there for good measure. It keeps me honest, because grief never quite disappears. In fact, it becomes even more nuanced, layered, and personalized. It lingers, develops flavors, or categories, per se. It trains itself, like AI, and gets better at knowing when and how to show up.
Completion.
It's not the promise of a happy ending, but the certainty of a new beginning. A fresh start I didn't plan for. But how could I? I was deep in work and obsessed with my craft, my plan, my process, my inquiries, myself. Nowhere in that plan was there a provision for the ending and the aftercare. There absolutely should have been.
Perhaps, from now on, there will be.
Until then, stay soft, stay good.
GV
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE BIRDS
By appointment MTN Space Gallery through November 1.
Please join us for our closing ceremony. Invite below.
