methods of embrace
There is a bird that lives in Australia and New Guinea. The male spends several years of his life perfecting the skill of building a structure on the forest floor in order to attract females. He is a bowerbird; the structure he builds, a bower.
I had been curious about this bird for some time, and, as much of my work is sparked by a curiosity that will simply not be quenched, I began my process of attempting to discover what it was that kept me engaged in this bird and his architecture—research, writing, drawing, sculpting, building. There are several species of bowerbird, and each has a unique style of bower that he builds. The architecture that holds my query most intently is the avenue—two parallel rows of vertical sticks secured into a mat of sticks on the ground.
I made this drawing on Ossabaw Island, March 2016. Charcoal on paper, 42 x 56 inches. I rolled it up and brought it home.
Time passed; life started looking quite different. Within a year, I found myself married, having given birth to my first child, settling into our home within a new community.
The drawing stayed rolled up until I moved into a new studio in January 2020, where I began work on a show scheduled to open March 20, 2020, four years (to the week) after I made the drawing. It will serve as a sketch for the first of two components which will make up the exhibition. There will be two installations that are designed to be experienced one after the other, and then the first one again.
The title and synopsis are as follows:
"methods of embrace"
an exploration of enclosures as pathway or destination, whether soft or sharp, made of segments and intersections...all the while an avenue of transformation.
I unroll the drawing for the first time since I made it. It’s like unrolling a scroll from a previous lifetime. So much has changed… What did it mean then? What does it mean now? Do I attempt to pick up where I left off or begin anew? Do I even remember what I was thinking about?
I search for a journal from 2016 that may provide more clues as I attempt to excavate my own mind. I find it. A full page reads as follows:
bower (n.)
: an attractive dwelling or retreat
: a lady’s private apartment in a medieval hall or castle
: a shelter made with tree boughs or vines twined together : arbor
bower (v.)
: embower, enclose
synonyms
:bosom, enfold, circumfuse, cocoon, embosom, embower, embrace, enclose, encompass, enshroud, enswathe, envelop, enwrap, invest, involve, lap, mantle, muffle, shroud, swathe, veil, wrap
There it is—among the list of other words, I see it.
I turn the page of the journal. On it, a list of names—the people who were there with me on Ossabaw—and beside each name, a single word.
There it is again, right next to my name:
Rachel embrace
And in the corner, three more words:
transition
evolution
shift
I still don't know exactly what I was thinking, exactly what those words meant to me at that time, but I do know I have circled back to them now, consciously or otherwise. And I think I know what they mean now—at the very least, I know I am on my way to a deeper discovery.
“Mama, what did the second little pig build his house out of?” asks my three-year-old son while I am making dinner. I kneel down on the floor beside him and we talk about the materials that each of the pigs used—straw, sticks, and bricks.
Although they were all building the same structure—a house—we quickly learn that there is great consequence regarding choice of material. But this is where we will leave the little pigs… our concerns are something other than a wolf.
Over the past several years, I have developed an intimate relationship with porcelain. Day after day, I handle the material in its fragile, bone-dry state—carving it, sanding it, loading it into kilns. My mind must be focused and my touch must be sensitive. I have come to recognize how this impacts my behavior outside of the studio as well, perhaps even how I exist in the world and among other people. In his book, “The Courage to Create,” Rollo May describes the risks of intimacy. “Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship…, we will not come out unaffected.” It is easy to discern that, as an artist, I influence my material—it is changed through my visions and manipulations of it. But it also goes the other way—I am simultaneously affected and transformed by my material.
So what happens when someone else encounters the objects of my delicate labors?
This is an inquiry, one that I hope to explore in this exhibition, “methods of embrace.”
What would it feel like to walk through this structure if it was made of sticks and twigs, as the bowerbird builds it? He uses it as a stage—a place to dance, to sing, and also to hide from his potential mate so that he can choose when he is seen and when he is not. Once a female becomes interested, the bower becomes a place for her to shelter as she observes her potential mate’s song and dance from a safe distance.
What would it feel like if it was made of steel rods? Would it be a fortress or perhaps a prison? A place where you are safe or a place where you are held against your will?
And so I ask myself: what will it mean when it is made of porcelain—a material that is inherently fragile, as in a teacup, and yet structural, as in tiles? When someone walks through this pathway—this avenue, this enclosure, this transition from one place to another—how will they respond, how will they change, how will they emerge from the embrace?
But I will have to wait to find out. The week before installation was scheduled to begin, a global pandemic was declared. We were all there. We know what happened. The show has been postponed. Tentative dates are set, but we also know that nothing is certain. In the meantime, my studio is littered with objects awaiting a space to come to life.
So we shelter in place. The tireless work that the studio had witnessed has now come to a screeching halt. I am grateful for the moments that I find here and there to continue to work on some of the smaller components of the installations.
Living in a rural area, we go for frequent walks, my son and I. “But we can’t go to the sandbox because there might be other people there,” he reminds me.
Right. Even at three years old, the gravity of the situation and the new mandates are embedded in him.
As we walk, we see neighbors—from a distance—and we wave. One day, a neighbor I haven’t seen in some time flashes an enormous smile and begins to walk across the street toward us—an old instinct to come closer and share a more intimate greeting than a wave. When I do not reciprocate the motion in her direction, she remembers the new rules and stops. My heart aches.
I wonder, when can we shake hands again? When can we hug? And even when it is “safe” to do so, how long will it take us to retrain our impulses to remain apart from one another? The healing power of touch has been robbed from us, and as a whole human society, I know we feel it.
Finally, one day, I remember.
I remember a truth about being a maker of objects.
I remember another way to connect.
I gather up one of the hundreds of porcelain pebbles that I have been making—the one component that I have been able to continue working on at home—and post this video and this text on Instagram.
INVITATION TO CONNECT: to hold a handmade object is to hold the hand of the maker. i would like to invite you to hold hands. we have been making these porcelain pebbles as a component for the upcoming shedspace installation at whitespace in Atlanta, but since it has been postponed, I’ve been trying to think of another way to have a human-to-human connection through these objects. so, if you send me a dm with your mailing address, I will send you one of these pebbles. they have been formed, refined, fired, sanded, sanded again, fired again, sanded, and polished. that is to say, they have been embraced and they have been caressed.
Someone I have met, but have forgotten; my best friend; a complete stranger; an artist who I admire; a teacher; a student—the addresses begin to roll in, and with them, notes of introduction, reflection, remembrance. I am overcome.
This, here and now—sheltering in place, enclosed in my home, on an unknown journey with an unknown end, confusing yet constant, individual pebbles slowly forming pathways across the country, transforming the way we connect—in this moment, this is my embrace. I had no idea.
This method of embrace was nowhere in sight when I wrote these words:
an exploration of enclosures as pathway or destination, whether soft or sharp, made of segments and intersections...all the while an avenue of transformation.
