A black bear (Ursus americanus) and a grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) bought me a pizza and an Aperol spritz last week. I will thoroughly explain, if you stay with me a moment.
IN the past month, I have undertaken the monumental labour of addressing the deferred bureaucracy of my life, unearthing the archived self that had acidified into a leathery bog body throughout the duration of my PhD studies. This is one of the sacrifices of undertaking research abroad: all things ‘real life’ left behind in pursuit of the sacred degree are there to haunt you once the certificate is in hand. For me, this looks like clearing out a large, packed storage unit of all of my worldly possessions that had been sitting untouched for three years, as well as filing four years of ignored income tax returns, wrapping up long overdue grant reports, etc. To be fair, some of the deferred bureaucracy (tax returns) occurred because my university could not (would not) correctly fill out the requisite government forms, despite my constant harassment. Hence, their deferred bureaucracy became mine.
I began the process of tying up some of these loose ends at the beginning of September, emptying my $500/month storage unit of its contents. I have unpacked a hundred boxes, deciding what to do with the assortment of objects I’ve lived without long enough to have detached from them. I’ve been either donating the dead weight to a local charity shop or selling higher end, rarer and/or newer things online through various channels. Clothing is scattered here and there at consignment shops. This is time consuming and a psychologically labourious task, but it has been interesting to a) try to unravel my bizarre thinking around why I held on to some of the useless or excess things I deemed valuable, and b) meet and experience the people who buy what I’m selling. Part of identity is built around and attached to the objects we accumulate as some expression of who we think we are, and the representations we assign to them. What do I have in common with the individuals who come to my door to take away my things into their homes? Today I met a lovely young woman who came to buy a sheepskin rug from my collection. In our friendly discussion, we discovered that we both work with the menstrual cycle and blood. While my research is primarily focused through biotechnological and art investigation, hers is around womb healing through awareness and understanding (aligning more directly with menstrual justice). Both our approaches integrate ritual aspects and community building. Making a new connection with the recipient of a part of my shed self is a lovely experience of entrusting some aspect of care to a stranger; the nominal exchange of cash becomes a conduit for something more wholesome and enduring. I gave her a good deal on the rug, welcomed her in to my home and consciously took the time for us to learn a little bit about each other. She left with my contact information and the possibility for a potential future interaction around our shared interests. It’s the way I’d like to exchange resources always, though of course that is an idealized (and even old-fashioned) perspective.
Many of my objects are relics from my former studio practice, as well as various laboratory items and assorted electronics components. There are older artworks — mainly textile pieces made of human hair. There is also the media archive of my art practice over 25 years: 35mm slides, newspaper articles, magazines, award certificates, zip drive discs, mini casettes, books containing my work, my early poetry chapbooks, journals, exhibition flyers and catalogues, etc. I fantasize about hiring someone to digitize and index everything properly, but have been sorting through it myself in an attempt to reduce the bulk. I’ve shredded two garbage bags full of old CDs, grade school yearbooks, photo albums (keeping the most relevant photos, of course), cards, letters, etc on top of already having burned several turbulent journals. I want the freedom of movement that can only come from decumulation, as I step into the next phase of my life. Furniture and other items have been liquidated into spending money.
This is where the bear and the seal return to my story. In my earlier art practice, I constructed objects of inanimate body materials such as carcass: bones, skins, intestine. I have been carrying a significant collection of animal skulls acquired in various ways, either scavenging at a secret provincial roadkill dump site (ultimately, an occult site), beachcombing, or stumbling across them on the forest floor during hikes—but most often I have acquired these things as ‘gifts’ given to me by others who share my fascination with found corporeal detritus. Last week, a young goth kid showed up at my door with a crisp $100 bill for the bear and seal skulls. I threw in a little mink skull that I’d cleaned during an artist residency in Dawson City. The mink carcass had been brought to me by a local character named Caveman Bill (who lived in an actual cave). The bear had originally cost me a trip to the hospital outpatients room for a tetanus shot after a nail went up through my shoe at the roadkill dump site; the seal had been a gift from a romantic hopeful who had found the head on a beach and scooped the brains out by hand before bringing it to me, knowing that the outrageous effort would win my heart. Over a decade later, I took my new acquired Canadian note to the local Retro Gusto and transmogrified the former lives into a funghi fior di latte and fizzy drink, pondering the shy goth kid who’d facilitated this feast.
This past weekend, I packed up my remaining (smaller) skulls and bones and rematriated them to a series of hidden outdoor locations nearby. A seagull skull dyed blue with indigo, heron beak, raccoon skull, cat skull missing a fang, lacquered frog, bird nest, reed, fossil, quartz, wishbones, mica flakes, and other items were carefully placed in trees, gardens, ponds, rushes and on bridges and posts. No doubt someone observant will notice and experience a little bit of wonder or queerness they otherwise wouldn’t have.
This demolecularization/ dispersal of my externalized material self is a massive surge towards ‘rebirth,’ the likes of which I haven’t experienced in many years. To connect this post to my last one, regarding aspects of class that have shaped my academic trajectory, I’ve realized something about my tendency to cling to small momentos and cluttery items. Beyond a fascination with weird shit and materiality in general, with the resonant energies they hold and the potential magical aspects of them, I now recognize that the scavenger/ collector/ hoarder mentality comes from a lived experience of poverty in my early life. This realization partly arises from revisiting my knowledge of my ancestors and their peculiar behaviours. To give just two examples: My Irish (maternal) grandfather was a city dump scavenger on Sundays, raking through the reeking castoffs of urban human lives, looking for treasures to take home to his wife and children. My Irish/Scottish paternal grandfather (still living) has hoarded junk his entire life, filling farm fields and wooded trails with rusted husks of cars, trucks, buses, tractors, etc., and outbuildings with random auction curios he’d dragged home. I’ve spent numerous hours crawling through these dark cobwebby barns, lit only by cracks of sunlight filtering through aged wooden beams to reveal stacked, sleeping antiques, greasy or rusty buckets of tools, and cultural relics cloistered in broken cabinets. Often smaller items would be gifted to my grandmother, who accepted them with her brand of tetchy consternation and grace. These men’s behaviours were shaped by the reality of having nothing fancy, finding value in the discarded, repurposing material to generate a sense of purpose in their own lives. My approach to my art practice is thus baked in, class-oriented and resonant not only with my ancestral activities but my own early life experiences of poverty and the need to surround myself with objects that represented material accumulation. Awakening to this framework of structure in my life and my need to shake it off is part of the ‘rebirth’ process, growing further into the self I have worked hard to cultivate, whilst also mining my own roots—all important for future work.
That future work is currently gestating, and will be interesting and challenging. All will be revealed in some months! In the meantime, this week I’m picking up another loose end: my deferred talk for Treadwell’s Books (in London) will finally take place on the full solar eclipse, this Wednesday, October 2. Wildly appropriate, as my audience will see. More info and tickets here: https://www.treadwells-london.com/events-1/occult-blood-artist-discussion-2. Also in October, I have work in three exhibitions: CASTING A SPELL IN COMPUTATIONAL REGIMES: Ritual Practices for a Trans-Feminist Counter-Apocalypse curated by Arianna Forte at SomoS in Berlin; GUI/GOOEY, a series of exhibitions curated by Laura Splan exploring digital representations of the biological world, at Plexus Projects in Brooklyn (and online); and, Metamorphosis, curated by Anna Isaak-Ross at Ectopia Lab in Lisbon, Portugal. I’ve put the details of each exhibition on my news blog here: https://whitefeatherhunter.net/
Dear friends, I hope you will continue to bear with me as I digest my material world and seal up the past by decluttering what no longer fits my life. Did I really need to keep six shower curtains? No. Now I only have two, though I have no need for either one of them, having transitioned to glass stalls in more modern housing. There will be a second purge after I get through the first rough cut. For now, I hope to see you on the eclipse! xx