your silence is a world for my language
I have been thinking about quiet violences -- to the environment, to women. The silences… that go unnoticed, or unspoken. That happen quietly, under bark and behind closed doors. That are carried in on crates, and through hushed words. The ones that go unregulated, and those that regulate us. The silences that change a landscape, and a life.
I walk in the bush, I gather hawthorns. These I stitch onto a used cotton sheet. It is in the spring that the ash borer begins its quiet work. It takes a year in a warm climate, two in colder ones, for an ash borer to kill a tree. Many, not all women, survive the violences. I don't know if any of the ash will survive.
Your silence creates a world for my language: this durational, process-driven text/ile installation project speaks to the quiet violences traced together in the s-groove lines of the invasive Emerald Ash Borer. Important ecologically and culturally (canoes, baseball bats, and other material culture), the ash tree, with its vulvic bark pattern, is also a women’s medicine.
This project explores and links environmental and sexual violences. There is a silent language we can read in the Borer tracks, and there is a silence we keep about sexual violences, which leaves its own tracks and traces. This silence leaves space for the language of invasives and invaders.
As a geographer, I am interested in how installation helps me grapple with the spatial and site-specific elements of environmental change.
In my traces you will find
silence, or bring your own to it.
In my tracks you will find the
language of my having been,
or you will not see at all.
In my marks there is the
record of my passage.
Unable to read my lines,
you cannot hear. Your
silence creates a world
for my language.
This project is also a way to breathe through grief: that associated with climate change, and the PTSD I experience as a result of sexual trauma. A stitch, a touch, a breath.
My silent stitching mirrors the silent work of the Borer: my hands perform spatial and embodied silences.
But my stitches are also a language. Each stitch simultaneously reveals the violence/language of the ash borer, and overwrites it with my own visual language. My lines claim the space of silence and the language of invader/invasive.
I have stitched 175 hawthorn needles in red thread to a used cotton bedsheet, and bound the sheet to the tree, using a stitch that resembles a suture. The hawthorn which protects the haw tree, provides no protection to the ash. I have been documenting the installed sheet over the last year and a half. During that time, I sit and quietly make hundreds and hundreds of backstitches onto used linen bedsheets, writing the lines of ash borers.
Marks. Making.
Ann Hamilton:
I am thinking about what poetry can do. It can evoke something difficult to talk about without scaring it from the room. It can render something present without stating it. It can leave something unsaid while making it present. I am relieved when I turn to the dictionary and find the root of poesis is "to make".
This durational process will eventually be installed in a solo show at 180 Projects in Sault Ste Marie in 2021.
My gratitude to Judy Martin for mentorship, and the Canadian Senior Artist Network for support.
