On the occasions I leave the flat, I walk with a mask leftover from the fires last fall. The air and the wind then had a material quality. The heat and the debris were tangible in the city insulated and isolated from the threat of fire. Across the Bay in Berkeley, the threat of fire was concrete. Power restrictions on the city and campus lead to canceled classes. I walked to and from the grocery when the bus was behind schedule. The mask only amplified the warmth, but to remove it, meant the inhalation ash and chemicals. I thought about the destruction of Pompeii and the burning of forests in the Amazon. I think of Australia’s fires now and the bodies of animals, trees, and people alike, distinguishable in size and form. Now the mask serves against a nearly invisible threat. The Bay Area manages to keep comparatively low numbers for its population since we were placed under the Shelter order in mid-March.
What are my quarantine objects? With what items do I interact on a nearly daily basis? Which of these are beneficial and improve my ability to cope during this time of isolation? Which of these impede my focus and set me off track? The items in my possession that play the largest role in my quarantine experience include my phone, my laptop, my knitting needles, and various balls of yarn. Unfortunately, my books have not featured a star role in isolation. Perhaps I ought to add the N-95 mask to my list. I so seldom leave the apartment that I’m not certain it counts. My partner and I currently inhabit a small studio in the Mission District in San Francisco. I love our flat, but during this time of working from home, we’ve both struggled to engage in meetings as they occasionally overlap. Additionally, the fruition of a solid schedule evades me.
I suffer from depression and anxiety and this cocktail of experience, while I do take medication, seems to worsen with the weeks and days in isolation. Paranoid about going out for walks or groceries, I largely exist in the flat, knitting. Positives: I have finished two projects in the last few weeks and began working on my first sweater. Negatives: I fail to focus, produce work, and read. My hands and fingers function far better than my thoughts.
I began ordering bouquets with the groceries a few weeks ago to bring some color back inside. My plants are nearly all succulents whose green is a comfort but sought vibrant company. In my wedding bouquet were ranunculus (ranunculi?) galore. Peonies are the state flower for Indiana and poppies for California all brighten my table on occasion. In that time, I consider the flora and fauna exhibits in our local museums, science, natural history, and art alike, each eliciting a certain expectation for how we interact with artifacts. Are we meant only to view them like in the galleries at the SFMOMA? Are we meant to touch them and experiment like at the Exploratorium? The flowers that come into my home propose a multitude of experiences. I pull them from their brown paper wreath, cutting the stems at a slant before planting them in a vase with sugar water. I discover pollen deposits on my fingertips after the fact. One bloom unfurls entirely, and I pull each petal away from its pistil and stamen. I prune the ferns and water the pots under UV lights as our apartment receives so little sun, candlestick and dolphin fin succulents each hungry for the rays. I employ these pretty plants to perform their pirouettes from dawn to dusk amidst the dust that settles as it passes through our windows open to fresh air.
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In my home exhibitions, there are no rules for the handling of artifacts save that each object be given respect. The piece of slate removed from the floor of a ruined church in Wexford that my friends and I bumbled through sits beside the slag of limestone covered in lichen plucked from the rubble of Inis Oírr’s shore. Each stone calls me home to cliffs and crags, seasides and sláinte. I am made to remember with fondness the relationships I came to create just by observing and removing these pieces from the wooden pallet upon which they rest. Pinecones from my walks over the hill in the Marina in San Francisco released their seeds in my home beside Irish stones. If shaken, more fall free from each knob. The greenery lost its verdant tone and appears faded like the inside of an avocado, nearly yellow. Bittersweet from my grandmother’s back garden accompanies the pine. Its earthenware-red berries are dry and unhusked from their casing, orange shells still attached at the nape. Sand dollars from Ocean Beach received a pink shine from sticky notes left in my pocket to dampen at their sides. From a strip of beach near Fisherman’s Wharf, I collected a chunk of driftwood, which I like to imagine was kissed by a seal before coming ashore. Two flat stones, the shade and opacity of milkglass, cannot speak their origin to me anymore. The shells scattered over this surface made their way home with me from Galway Bay. The width and length of a litmus strip a single dried bit of seaweed curls beside the amethyst backed with moss that I rescued from a shop just before the Shelter in Place order took effect.
This is an exhibition, yes. However, it might more appropriately be an altar. When I was a child, I collected stones and shells and flowers from my mother’s garden. I selected pinecones and moss-covered twigs from my grandmother’s creek and side yard. I protected images of my grandfather’s barn full to the brim with dry-straw colors and, on the outside, that brilliant robin’s egg blue. I find that barn in the coffee cups and pour-over device I procured for my kitchen. I see it in the turquoise of my rings and in the jars holding rye flour on the shelf and in photographs of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic wide open, stirring.
The intangible material that I wish I could harness and hang onto of my own accord is the wind. There were days in Ireland when it was nothing more than the brush of heather against my check and others when, at the Cliffs of Moher, we were struck down in the parking lot near the bus. Its velocity and shift so stringent, but it was alive. I felt it in my bones. It brought the sea up from the cliff and deposited droplets and waves alike in our hair and on our skin. All that is a memory though. Some mornings I walk to the Marina in the city and a flicker of that gust I knew would pulse over the hill and through town. I would get a whiff of Cork or Dublin from that gash of water in the air.
In my flat, altar stations abound unintentionally. The bits and bobs I mentioned from my each of my homes serve as one always on display but seldom recognized. The yarn trap that waits to be knotted into shapes is another resting beneath posters not yet mounted. Dried thistle, heather, and eucalyptus rest in the built-in with a small porcelain wire-haired fox terrier for company. His name is Bruce. Stacks of instant photos serve remain tucked away for safe keeping, highlighting my last visit to Ireland two years ago. The time in Galway, Waterford, and Cork all still so near to my mind. Perhaps finally the bookshelf and piles of texts around the room serve as altars too. Altars of knowledge waiting for me to pour over them like I ought to do.
In Kay Turner’s Beautiful Necessity: The art and meaning of women’s altars, the author notes that, “An altar is very much a ‘between’ place, a meeting place invisible powers are given material form; the material is made to serve the spiritual and vice versa…A threshold is also a point of departure; it is exuberant with the dynamism of change and choice. It evokes cathexis: the discharge of desire” (30). The objects on my own altars, whether I intended this or not upon their creation, afford me the physical place to observe and respond to what I am missing and what I hope to achieve and earn. For me, these altars are realms of personal existence that revolve around certain qualities I would like to explore. My collection of needles and skeins of yarn is representative of my desire to work with my hands more often, to make things from scratch. The pallet of found objects reminds me of each home I’ve known and loved, holding me to them and my promises to always return. The bookshelf and its contents reference my aspirations for poetry, folklore, and storytelling. The record player and accompanying vinyl lift my voice and spirits. In each of these stations, another aspect of my self exercises its abilities to stretch and engage.
Sara Baume explores the process of making art, both physical and literary, in her new book Handiwork. At her desk in the morning, her first work station, she describes the scene as she writes and types. “Far more often than the tips of my fingers touch the keys, the nails of my fingers grope for abrasions — old spots, damaged cuticles, the ragged line joining hair to scalp…In the hours before noon, I sit at my desk pecking at the weakest points of my body, whittling away tiny pieces of my fabric” (91). All too familiar is this experience of fiddling and pecking away at one’s self rather than the keys or the work. The deconstruction and destruction of my body is a task that I may measure and observe as nails regrow and are bitten to the quick once again. I record the work in the hours I dismember myself and my thoughts. The second guessing and the impossibility of choosing the correct word haunt me. And then, I set down one word or one stitch after the next anyway.
Word Witch 