CoCocoon

I wove my cocoon with the participation of community. Everyone was invited. We have been recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene. Together and held by a thin line, we manipulated this limp, linear material into form and space. A process that set up the stage for sharing and connection. Like life experiments and a child like game in our hands, a common thread was created and yet as varied as each of us. By giving structure to this flaccid material, we held each other up.

The process fluctuated between my solitary webbing and that with community joining in.

[Show as slideshow]

When I visited the artist residency months prior, I realized I’ve been there before. A couple of years ago I dreamed that I was in a white wedge space filled with light weaving myself into a cocoon. Two days before the hurricane I had a different dream —wanting my paddle board and life preserver which were not on me as I needed them to paddle my way out of my apartment. I evacuated ahead of the water force that would swallow my town and all around me. I went to my daughter’s apartment in the adjacent county of Buncombe and from there we evacuated again as the same river, the very old French Broad, encircled her home too.

I received the invitation to the Lamplight Artist Residency while displaced from Hurricane Helene. There wasn’t any greater need for me at that time but to weave myself into a web, to loose myself into a meditation in string, full presence while in the act of cocooning and swaddling. And yet, I asked if I could take this offer a few months later as there were so many pressing things to complete: moving, carting life, gathering all my spread out self briefly…

Ironically by the time the commitment came, the yurt my daughter and I were living in after being in 7 other “homes” in a two month period, and which had been nurturing during the winter, became uninhabitable. It was summer, unlivable hot, ticks crawling on us —a few attached to me in a two week period. Little did I know the artist residency, that sliver of space flooded with light I had dreamed of, would become home.

Alone, and finally with my cat Arequipe, I expanded and created space —rooms within rooms, implied, delineated space as ephemeral and allusive as home is and has been.

Bending, merging and overlapping life stories and the purpose of dreams, as lines which emerged from hooks and nails —blemishes left by prior residents of the art space, the palimpsest of earlier projects. Through the guidance of light, and sun setting on walls and floor, shadow space emerged. The dimensionality of time passed, graphed and captured as delicate lines which cocooned me.

Visit CoCocoon video

[Show as slideshow]

Others brought music, conversation, surprise mini performances and their playful spirit. Collective experiments with string bonded us. Healing as much as one can heal from the layered experiences that tied tongues, mangled speech, knotted bodies, lost lives, disrupted memories.

The first group gifted me a sculpture. Fluid, vibrant. By the time the second group came in, cocoon beginnings became a backdrop for surprise and impromptu mini performances [*watch mini performances in the slideshow at the top of project page].

The third group merged prior participants with new ones literally and metaphorically as the works were combined into a collective organic piece in dialogue with the vanishing lines of overlapping worlds that housed me while unhoused.

Through knotting, looping, weaving, expressive explorations as varied as each of us, mini performances and collective weaving meditations were created. Notations in space gifted to my process as delicate sculptures, singular and collective that I then intertwined into a big piece. Held by a string, we held each other in community gaining strength by each others contribution.

[Show as slideshow]