oil & rust: a revisit
I just found out today that my grandparent's farm might be sold and all the contents that are left on the farm are to be sold in an estate sale, literally today. I wasn’t notified. I wasn’t told. My heart is breaking.
Though I understand when things have to go this way, I am obviously devastated. As anyone who loves a place would be.
If anyone has known me long enough, they know how much I love this place, and how much it means to me. I usually tell anyone I meet in my vast travels about my grandpa's farm, down to the details of the fence posts, the barn construction, the old tools and tobacco advertisements. For 12 years I photographed the objects on the farm and in the surrounding area, but especially on the farm. Mostly in black in white. I have thousands of photos. It was a study for me in decay, in nostalgia, in deep story and ancestral connection. People told me to keep going. Like Aimee Joyaux. And Chris Davenport. Objects and places hold SO much of our ancestors. They live there. This place has always been home. THE home. Where I go in my dreams when I want a safe place. I spent so much of my childhood there, with my grandmother, day in and day out. It is what I remember the most in my childhood as being a safe place, a place of being loved so dearly by my grandmother who I still dream about and I feel like talks to me sometimes.
And anyone who knows me well also, knows that my association with objects and 'things' is a kind of world-making, as whole universes pour for me out of the web of connection that comes out of them. It's how I remember so many plants, their locations even after years of not being there, and all the stories I ever heard about them. And what they tell me themselves. It's where I tell stories from, the prompting from a singular object, pours from me an incredible depth of feeling. Of grief, of love, of curiosity, all things connected. SO obviously the loss of the farm 'things' is difficult for me, though they are just objects and nothing lasts forever.
I think there has been some doubt at times by some people as to whether I even love the place where I come from. Because I can't seem to come back and stay. I can understand how it might seem that way for some people who don't understand the complexity of how I relate to and see place, and hold all of what is happening in the world on its many layers. And I'm plenty wrong sometimes. And perhaps I can never fully redeem myself.
It's all a lesson in letting go, which has never been easy for me.
I don't always write just for nostalgia, for just the good times, but also the deep grief, hardship and mystery too. It can be off putting to people sometimes, and with influences like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (magical realism master of South America) whom I read everything written along Ernest Hemingway when I was 15 years old -- my style of reflection and story is not simple or always straightforward and yet people often tell me I'm a straightforward person. Some things just aren't that simple and the stories are told in alternative universes, of the southern gothic cracks in the floorboards where the moonshine hides and the mice hold the vessels hostage, a sprinkling of tobacco leaf from ages layers with dust and dirt-- and indeed they are all real players who become whole universes themselves.
And yet it all comes from love. My heart is so big. I know my true intention. I want the best for the land, for humans, for all the creatures in place. Sometimes I love too much for my own good in such an intense world where we are told what is valuable is how we look and how much money we make, not our cups of tea and kinship bonds, or the care and health of the land itself. That's my true words-- I love the land where I come from, which birthed me, where my ancestors have been for generations.
The red soil made my bones, it is me.
And I am not ashamed of it, even with the things that have happened in Virginia that some people want to forget that is a part of me too. Whether someone wants to misinterpret, twist, or only take one piece of my work and turn it into another narrative is on them. I invite a view into the complexity of how love and grief, general curiosity into the depth of humans, can take many forms. I am no saint. I admit it in my own work. I am full of contradiction and call out my own sense of supposed worldliness, and fall deep back into the simplicity of the dust, dirt and salt of the earth, through this constant reckoning, knowing that I don't really know. Some folks see that in my work, others do not. You decide for youself. I am no better than anyone.
I came from red soil. I'll go back to red soil.
I've been making art about where I grew up since I was 18, even my big project at Penland School of Crafts in 2016 print studio was about the complexity of the landscape where I grew up.
It's ok for me to be wretchedly sad. I get sad when I see clearcuts of forests I love. When people I love leave me or hurt me, when my gardens die from floods or grass or who knows what. I feel it all so damn deeply. Because I love it all so deeply. I am sad that this sacred place that is sacred to lots of other folks too, the hearth of my grandmother, is shifting. So sad, I'll likely cry for days, and there's no blame in those tears, but just grief I refuse to ignore. It's mine and its special and worthy of being expressed. It obviously has been up for me for awhile otherwise I wouldn't have been making art about it.
I used to dream of restoring the fields to native piedmont prairie plants, plant the ponds with cattails and calamus to clean them and make habitat, grow acres of medicinal herbs to sell and have small rotational grazers like goats, but alas that dream died long ago. It's such a foreign thing where I grew up, to try this way, it doesn't seem always possible, and yet, I travel places far and wide where I see it being done, and only wish I could have where I came from. I have even been staying this summer on a medicinal herb farm in Colorado that is 5 acres or so and they're doing a version of what I had once dreamed of in the area where I grew up.
No doubt, I love the swampy rivers, the cedar trees, the braid-barked persimmons, fat fruited pawpaws, the barns being swallowed by Virginia-creeper and Poison Ivy. Even the Ground ivy, Pinwheel flower, milkweeds, sweetgums, Sycamore. I don't love how it was to be a woman trying to farm, or having universalist religious views or problems with racist language. And it's ok for me to say that without it meaning I hate the place or the people. Or feel like people can't be their complex selves, even if I don't agree with them all the time. Often people tell me when I question invasion biology on my podcast, that I must hate native plants. If I ask questions about God, I must hate God. That logic is so frustrating and doesn't leave room for the conversation itself, held in-between. And there, I've lain, ever since I left home and went and got a Religious Studies degree, in order to try to understand why. Why did I grow up this way? Why are things this way? Why do these people hate these people and love those, and why pray this way or that? What is spirit really?
To me, God is in the land, all around us, and we have a duty to tend to it. Our ancestors live in the spaces we tend, and there God and our ancestors dance in our continued reverence and curiosity, motions, questions and truth telling.
Virginia has a long complex past. Long Leaf Pine Savannas, old Prairies, a land where controlled fire used to totally paint the land with wildflower color. The Tobacoo that became famous grown from its red soil, humid air and abundant water. Enslavement, poisons, misue of land- those stores have to be acknowledged alongside all of the beautiful ones of pies, family and sweet potato curing houses, celebrations, handmade clothes and iced tea. In my photos and stories over the years, I always spoke to this in many ways. I see so much in simply one object.
I'm going to reshare some old photos I took back in the day in coming times, some that have been off the blog for a few years and some that have been there the whole time. And some old writings. Grief has been a big player in my life for awhile, and yet it is also what brings so much beauty, heart and depth to the art, writing and work I do--- I just feel so darn deeply. Grief and love are the same thing.
As someone who swims in some kind of neurodivergence, often I can feel everything everyone is feeling in the room and I'm trying to hold it all. I can feel the emotion that got put in to a 'thing' or around a 'thing', or the love poured into a pet, a piece of land, a deeply grooved doorstep. It might be uncomfortable for some, but tears are gifts. They are gifts to the ancestors, all of them. The non-living humans. The plants, the soil itself. The homes, the barns, the old tools and the special quilts.
So here's a snippet of a piece I wrote long ago, from my first memory in this farm house that I grieve. Here is where I understood love for the first time, with my grandmother, Janie who showed me unconditionally. The rest of the piece if you want to read the entire thing, is linked below. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, like I've mentioned and his style of writing about family, life, land and the complexity of culture and politics, in a way that is almost biblical, mythical, symbolic, and hyberbolic, always influences me.
"I arrive with a flash of white that it paints the landscape around me, so big and lambent, endless. The land is hot, cyan. The contrast creme luminescence soaks into my small body, I am the thick humid place. Space is chiseled outlines and defined by the extremes. The chalky fence line is painted a million times over, peeling from the sun. The house a towering monolith on the barren scorched landscape. This monolith with eyes makes a shadow, and next to it with a smaller shadow is the big rough shape shooting out of the flat plane [an oak tree]. All is quick, nonlinear and ping pong. Yet, time is slow like molasses, or flashing frames of stillness like pine sap on a winter’s day. I hear no sounds. I am in a container that moves across crisped land [a car]. Then, I'm out. I am hovering through the bright blinding immensity. I move towards a black shape hovering on a porch. Slightly humped over, a long straight skirt defines the body and big hanging curved arms protrude out. Confetti flying in circles emerge inside my inner landscape. I am the land, but I am also another [love]. I am all of the brightness and shadows. I fear even though I know [it’s okay]. This figure is she. She loves me. She was waiting in the hot cyan thick for us. I know she loves me even though I don’t understand I am separate. I don’t know what love really is. It hasn’t been analyzed or broken. There is only feeling. My body is the land, and the land is treacherous. It feels, expands, unfolds exponentially into all that I see. Singularity is the beating heart, embodying love. " (originally published 2017)
oil and rust read the rest here.
the whole town is scavenging my grandpa’s farm right now as I write this. my whole body hurts. I wish something else could have happened. It was never up to me. how can i think about anything else I have to do now?