A Roundtable
on Black Elegiac Form

Kimberly Juanita Brown (KJB): The contours of your artistic production, individual and collective, speak to a much larger world of image-making that coheres around geography, race, gender, and genre. Drawing, performance, photography, painting, film, et cetera: you move through so many different aesthetic possibilities.
Can you speak a bit about what animates your art process once you begin thinking about creating a piece of work? Do you begin with the concept for the medium? Who are your artistic interlocutors?

Toby Sisson (TS): I almost always start with a question. There's something in the world that I want to know more about or that I fundamentally don't understand; or occasionally, something I encounter that captures my imagination in some way that I feel I need to spend more time with. It feels luxurious to make art about something that captures your imagination. It often feels like a great indulgence for me that I get to do this because I'm pampering myself in a way, and exploring ideas. 

Occasionally I come across answers. It isn't to say that every time a question intrigues me, I have to find the answer. I'm mostly engaged with a question. It's something that I want to probe and think about. And it's also an opportunity to be in community with audiences, with other artists, with other people who are thinking about those same questions and ideas. 

Dell Marie Hamilton (DMH): For me, it’s about material and site. I could be in my studio looking at some drawing, or some abandoned failed idea that didn't work before, but is now on the floor and looks interesting next to this other drawing that also didn't work. And then all of a sudden something else happens. In terms of site, it's almost always around site-specific performance.

When an invitation comes in to perform in a museum, the first thing I go do is meet up with the curator and we do a site visit, spending time in the space, particularly if it has sonic possibilities. If I sing, or I say a person's name, sometimes the walls are so high that an echo starts to happen. Sometimes, depending upon a pair of shoes that I might be wearing. I hear heels clacking on the surface, and I realize that I'm going to incorporate that into the performance. Visually, my brain sort of latches onto a particular material or context. That becomes a sort of linchpin for how the piece starts to evolve. 

Amanda Russhell Wallace (ARW): It varies for me depending on the type of project that I'm doing. In family photography, my interest is in observing my family. I’ve always been a quiet, laidback person, and I've always watched my family. I enjoy seeing them interact because, usually there's a good time being had, like at family gatherings. 

It's part documentation, but it's also a joy for me to watch them and to record our interactions and create this archive for us, because part of it is about us not having access to images of our ancestors. I've been really wanting to see my great grandmother, my maternal great grandmother, and nobody really has photos of her. We have not come across one. 

In 2018, I had a show of some of these photos and I was terrified because this would be the second time (first, in 2008 for my undergraduate senior exhibition) my family would actually see themselves on a gallery wall. One of my cousins called to thank me for the show, because his mother had recently passed away. He said I was honoring the queens of the family. And so, in that moment, I was like, ‘This is good that I’m doing.’

The other half of my work is more aligned with what Toby was saying about questions. If I'm looking at something in archives, it’s about what's missing or what struck my attention. Or it could be something that I overhear: it could be a relative, or someone that I'm passing in public, or something that I've read. These kinds of text and words follow me. Then there’s the text that I write. I'm not a poet, but I write poems occasionally, and I keep them and eventually make something visual from that. Other work is just an exploration of different kinds of technology. 

DMH: Yeah, you make some work for yourself and then you make other work for the world. 

ARW: Exactly. Thank you for saying that, because that's what it is. 

DMH: I once heard an actor saying that you make the blockbuster movie for the world and you take character roles and you make that work for yourself, as an artist, because you're trying to work out your own vocabulary or a set of questions or problems. 

The curatorial projects and the performances that I do are highly choreographed because they're within these institutions.  A lot of my drawings and photographs and collages are fairly intuitive and that work I'm often making for myself. And it almost always has to do with mourning, or some kind of personal memory, that I'm trying to give shape to. 

KJB: I have a question about being creators who are also Black women. Who told you you could do that? How did you know? How did you go down this road? Who let you? Which family members supported you? 

Artistic production is often treated as a luxury that does not belong to most people of color and that definitely does not belong to women of color and Black women. It must be a lifetime of artistic production set against a kind of visceral resistance because of who ordinarily makes art and how you negotiate that space. 

TS: It took me a long time, really to muster the courage to be able to allow myself to live the idea of an artist, to really inhabit it. I came to that mid-life, so I don't know that anybody gave me permission. It was after my parents were gone, so I didn't really have to explain. They were both terribly creative people, but they weren't educated in the arts. This path wasn't held out as something that was an employment prospect or professional goal that I could achieve. It took me a long time to sneak up on it, but I think I was frustrated for so long that eventually the dam broke, and I realized, if I don't do this, then I'm betraying myself. 

My first comment about feeling that art was indulgent carried over from an early part of my life when I didn't think that it was viable for me to follow my impulses. I eventually got over myself, and realized that what was really standing in the way was me and my conception of what the world would or would not expect. My mother used to say: “We would care less what others think of us if we realized how seldom they did.”

It's powerful when you realize that the world is really not studying you. That this was something that I owed myself and wanted to pursue. So that's how I embodied it and inhabited it, after personal power struggle and insecurity, never looking back.

DMH: You raise interesting points, Toby. Something similar happened to me. I was not someone who knew that I was a creative person, but I knew that to some extent I had a creative impulse. I didn't necessarily think about visual art until I got to undergrad and I took photography. My undergraduate degree is actually in journalism. But back in those days, they basically taught you how to do everything because you didn't know if you were going to be at a weekly paper or a daily paper. So it was everything from photojournalism to graphic design. That's when I realized that I could think in both picture and words and that that conversation happened in reverse as well.

The dam broke when I was in my mid-thirties. Both the cats died. My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A cousin was killed in a double murder. A boyfriend left. My doctors thought I might have lupus. I had all this stuff going on in my head and I realized that it was going to be now or never, because at that point, it was more about, ‘Well, maybe you need to go out on disability. You're having too much chronic pain.’ Little did I know that the chronic pain was a function of trauma that had not been dealt with and an undiagnosed bout with scoliosis. 

I was like, ‘Let me just let me put in these graduate school applications. I got these photographs. Let's let's see what happens.’ The dam broke and then it just kind of all came pouring out and it had to go somewhere else. 

ARW: I'm joking with myself now, like, ‘I don't know if the dam has broken!’ But, growing up, I drew a little bit, I think it was part therapy, but I was always doing portraits of people. I would look at a photograph, I think, and try to draw portraits of my family members. And I realized at some age that this maybe isn't my best talent. But my family thought I was really talented. 

When I went to college, I had a very creative friend who'd draw every single day. And I wasn't like that. She said it seemed like I wanted to take an art class, and she convinced me to take a drawing class, and then eventually convinced me to double major. I double majored in art, and I was really just kind of playing around. 

Then, Senior year, Kimberly, is when you come into the picture and I can blame you.  

KJB: Yes. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice, Amanda was an undergraduate and she took one of my feminist writing classes as a studio art major. She was really good at literary criticism. I was like, if you have this kind of talent, using both sides of your brain, you should really pursue it. She said she was going to law school. I have nothing against lawyers, but she won the student prize in photography her senior year. I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ I was telling the story for years afterwards. Then, you were a paralegal for a year? 

ARW: A receptionist. Not even a paralegal, at a criminal defense firm in Houston. And that did it. Not even a full year. 

DMH: You know what? That's important. Sometimes you actually have to figure out what kind of stuff you don't want to do. That gives you a lot of information. I remember, when she was a fellow at the Hutchins Center, playwright Lisa Thompson would say, pay attention to who you're jealous of or who you're envious of. That might say something about what an unanswered desire is. You might need to go deal with that.

KJB: ‘Black Elegies in Sight & Sound’ is about the myriad ways that Black art is always already bound up with grief. When thinking about the poetic elegy, I would be hard-pressed to find a Black poet who is not conversant with the elegy, though the genre is heavily white -- not exclusively, but heavily. 

I became interested in the production of the elegy outside of poetry, where I believe that Black artists are able to expand notions of loss and longing. And so I'd love to hear you speak for a bit about your work on loss and how you navigate mourning and artistic production. 

DMH: For Emulsions in Departure, I was in my first semester at grad school at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, at Tufts University, I was studying with Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, and I had gotten an invitation to show some work at the Harvard’s Smith Center. I didn't have time to build a body of new work, but I had these images on the computer, and I remember scanning the negatives and realizing that I had the scanner on the wrong setting. It created a film over some of the existing images. By the time I was finished scanning the roll of film, I had created an entirely different set of images than initially intended. 

The roll of film itself documented my walks along the beach, or along the Charles River. There are some spaces where you feel ecstatic joy, and other places where there's a sense of melancholy. So I was developing this body of images and scanning them and using the chance operations of this machine that I didn't quite understand. To me, that became a really powerful metaphor for grief and mourning, because we often can't apprehend the whole of it, particularly, if it's a really profound loss, it's never really complete anyway. It feels kind of gossamer, like really delicate. And then other times it feels engulfing.

My fingerprints are in the images, which also happened through the chance operations of scanning. As I got the image up on the screen, the rich color itself knocked me out with the fact that it did capture my fingerprints. That really appealed to me, because, when you are learning photography, it's very much about creating this really pristine image and keeping your negatives clean. And I realized I'm a very messy artist and I don't mind if people are seeing the fact that I'm handling my materials. I was also thinking about the film as skin, and the epidermalization of race that Fanon talks about. 

I had to give up carrying heavy equipment because I've got some tendonitis issues, so these are shot with a Holga, a toy camera that isn’t made anymore. All of the layering and the mistakes that were happening in the process of developing and printing this work are indicative of the way that I work in the studio and certainly in the way that I make performance -- this constant layering of meaning that is happening in the process that I don't necessarily have words for just yet. I believe that there's something that's really, to me, haunting. I immediately thought of the sea, the ocean. I thought of the Black Atlantic, whether it's the deep blue or the deep red. 

These images were never shown at Harvard, but they were subsequently printed in 2016 when I was an artist-in-residence at Camilo Alvarez's gallery, Samson Projects. I realize that the title made sense, because, when I'm walking along a beach, and the water and the waves are coming up on the sand, it reminds me a lot about when you're in the darkroom, and the water is washing over the image and the tray. All those things came together once I printed the images and had them up on the wall and realized how people were responding to them. 

TS: There's a sense of vastness that for me very much mimics the idea of grief. You're in the face of it all the time and it's undeniable and it goes on like smoke and you can’t see the end of it or the beginning of it. These work metaphorically in a really beautiful way. 

ARW: Dell, when I was looking  at your work, I was struck by the language. I looked up the definition of emulsion, and the word suspension comes up, so I’m thinking of a suspension. We can't really leave a fingerprint on water. But I'm looking at this and I'm asking myself, ‘How is there this feeling of a fingerprint on water?’ And I'm thinking, ‘What would that sound like?’ 

I went further into thinking about transatlantic slavery, about this imagined world of fingerprints on water. It related to my very slow reading of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. 

DMH: Christina was my graduate advisor, and I feel really privileged that she was. She taught a course called “The Memory for Forgetting.” Part of it is about our inability to have a full picture of the pain and the grief and the loss. But even in those things, there's just all this poignancy and beauty. I'm always very much thinking about a seductive image so that even in my performances, people tell me they look like paintings and drawings. 

What's interesting about these questions about water and the transatlantic slave trade, is that they didn't come until afterward. My family has all these coastal ties to Belize and Honduras and the Caribbean. For Magda (Campos-Pons) - her 2007 exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art was titled Everything Is Separated by Water. For my family, everything is connected by water. So water has the possibility of adventure -- or just having an income. One of my great grandparents had a tugboat of his own, and he made his living on the water. I remember going to the beach with my dad as well and walking along the beach. My mom can't swim. My dad can. So there's all those memories that I have in terms of the water itself, as well as this level of possibility. 

Then, what happens when you bring the image into Photoshop and scan it? People thought it was printmaking, and I explained that I'm using my scanner like a print maker. I was surprised and moved when I showed these images and people responded to them. 

TS: The series Black Tears came out of my own meditation on grief. It happened very much like a chance operation: I'm going to set up a series of circumstances, and from those, the output will be the work.

It was summer of 2014. We can all remember what was capturing everyone's imagination at that point. There was Michael Brown. There was death after death after death. We seem steeped in it. There was a sort of collective outpouring of grief. And I was feeling it myself as well. And I wanted to be mindful of that. But I didn't know how that was going to manifest in the work.

So I went into the studio and on really large pieces of paper and little pieces of paper and scraps and sketchbooks, I started just making a mark again. It was about picking up a tool, picking up some materials and seeing what happens. And I found that the mark that I was making was always kind of pendulous. It had that drip form. I don't know why. I think anybody who makes work on a regular basis knows that there are certain shapes, forms patterns, colors that seem to be drawn to it, almost to the point where you occasionally have to set up situations for yourself to avoid them so they don't become habitual. 

But I wasn’t really too worried about that at that moment. I just wanted to work with materials and meditate on the grief that I was feeling, the sadness, and find a release. I was making these forms that after I made a lot of them, like literally hundreds, I realized I was making what I consider to be tears. And they were all in just sumi ink with a big sort of fat, clumsy sumi ink brush. And I was getting different dilutions of ink to water. So some were gray and pale. Some were dark and opaque. And I just kept making them because they felt good, because I could now start to identify that I was creating tears that were my own expression of grief, and in some ways reflected this sense of a collective outpouring of grief that I was seeing happening in the news and on the radio. 

I had a curator visit my studio to look at some different work, and the pile of tears -- literally, a pile of tears, my pile of tears -- were kind of shunted off in a corner. And he immediately went to those instead of what I was wanting to show him. And he said, ‘What are these? Tell me about these.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don't know what those are.’ But I explained the process, and he grabbed a bunch, and he said, ‘can we look at these on the wall?’ So it really grew out of a collaboration with the curator, and my own sense that it was going somewhere, even though I didn't know where. 

DMH: What I love about these, Toby, is the variation. I know exactly what it's like to be playing with materials and seeing what happens. Ink on paper is always beautiful, which is one part of it. The second thing is, if you can make all these variations and then still have them in relationship with one another, but then still have this maintain this kind of individuality, that is a gift. 

What's also interesting to me here is that in some of them, at least in this far right corner, they look like areolas. And so I think of this as about suckling, too. 

TS: I learned that I couldn't make them exactly the same way even if I wanted to. They weren't as interesting when I was trying to make them the same. But if I just touched down in a different place on the page, if I switched between my dominant and non-dominant hand, if I loaded up the brush so it was saturated or worked with the brush that felt almost dry, if I used a higher concentration or lesser concentration of ink, it made all the difference. And it made them more interesting. And it also seemed to reflect the idea that grief is quite individual. 

They can be tears. They can be blood. That can be sweat. They can be milk. But the point is kind of a default, right? Because I have the sumi ink. So that's what I went to. I like that the association feels really broad.

Each one of these small sheets are coated in beeswax on the front and the back. I quickly realized that the paper itself, just watercolor paper with simple ink, was incredibly vulnerable. I added a very thin coat of pure beeswax on the front and back. It makes the paper not transparent, but a little translucent. 

The tears are very small, and the overall scale of installations is variable. Each one of the tears remains held to the wall with a thumbtack to the wall and then the magnet on the front of the drawing. So they kind of flutter. You know, they hang loose like a shingle. You don't want them matted and pressed and removed from the viewer. I want them to feel vulnerable and pendulous just the way a tear does. 

KJB: That is part of the way that I approach this piece. I think I should be touching it, or that there is something text-based about the tears.

TS: I'm fine with people touching them. It was really important to me that they be accessible. Once they have the skin coat of wax on them, you're not going to leave an imprint, and they're a little bit more sturdy. 

I also wanted them to be incredibly cheap. I talked the galleries into offering them at cost. I said: what if I make twenty dollars and you make twenty dollars for each one of these? Because it's a collective outpouring of grief and because I fundamentally believe that grief is lessened when it's shared. I would like people to have one if they want one. And most fine art is not accessible for me. I can't really even afford most of my own work. But it was important to me that this be something that someone could have at least one of, or several. 

ARW: I don't know if you all experience this or not, but if you're at a funeral or some kind of memorial service, and you're in church, and before someone starts singing, maybe you're trying to hold it together. And then once the music starts, when you're trying to hold your tears, there's this one tear that is just there, but doesn't want to fall down, it's just lingering. And I kept thinking about that when I'm looking at these because of the size. Some of these tears feel heavy. It felt like there would be that tear that you're just like, ‘Can you please come down?’ So everything else can just come out. 

TS: Thank you, Amanda, that’s really generous. I often think of them as a waterfall, sort of suspended -- back to this wonderful word that you brought to our conversation. I think of them as being in suspended animation. They're all there for us, in mid-flight. 

DMH: As you're struggling to try to make sense of grief and loss, by putting them in this grid, you're trying to control it as well. You're trying to tell the viewer that there is a way we have some control over our grief, even though that's not generally the case. But it gives the viewer some license to let go a little bit, because you've done all the hard work for them, by letting all of this stuff come channeled through you and then into these beautiful drawings. 

KJB: In the conversation around elegies, I felt like I had to put Black in front of that term, because the category held within it is not assumed to be Black. Similarly, it's not as if people don't think Black people cry or have tears. But something about the grammar of putting together Black tears makes visible something that people could take for granted or be indifferent to. And that's not really allowed, especially in the structure of the grid, As you discussed, Dell. 

ARW: Mo(u)rning Tea Extracted was made in the first half of my last year of graduate school. I was interested in the idea of mourning issues related to Black hair. At first, I was just going through archives, saving different kinds of old videos, including educational videos and government videos. I even put out a request on social media to gather responses. I was going to do this very experimental video work with a collage of different videos. 

Then it was October 2010. My paternal grandmother passed away suddenly. I had to go to Texas. Two days after her funeral, my father ended up in the hospital. His appendix ruptured, and he really nearly died. So I was in Texas much longer. So that put a delay in my thesis project until some weeks later when I went back to New York City. Then I had to figure out different living arrangements in New York. I just had all these delays with the process. When Kimberly reached out about participating in this conversation, I remembered that my grandmother passed away shortly before I started having to make this, and so nearly losing my dad. I didn't know that it was part of this art-making process. 

It was really sad to read people's comments from the informal survey. I ended up expanding it from hair texture to identity-related things with African-Americans, about wanting to put some of these things underneath -- to bury them -- so that we can move forward. I knew that I wanted a domestic setting. I had this idea of people, you know, having a conversation, wanting to have a conversation, but not really coming to have that conversation. 

I had four actresses in New York City read this dialogue that I had written. It plays at the beginning of the piece. And there are two alternating scenes: me in this more brightly lit apartment, then this darker environment. In between those, I am reading passages from Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. I selected passages that really spoke to ancestry, archives, and a frustration with racism. I wanted it to feel like there was this kind of time travel because of course, I was inspired by Butler's work. 

The movements are intentionally slow, because, in a way similar to Toby, I'm trying to get people to  just engage, even though you might want to push, pause or stop on the video because it's drawn out, corresponding to the whole drawn out process of being Black in this country. I was trying to kind of recreate this feeling, but in this domestic setting with only one participant who's looking out the window -- expecting people to come to tea, but they never come. 

KBJ: I find part of the pace of this film to be deeply mournful, but also deeply soothing. And it's a combination of the spoken words and then the kind of bifurcation between the left side of the space where the figure in the darker light appears, and then the other figure that drifts in and out. 

ARW: That was very intentional, thank you for noticing. Every movement I was trying to make it feel, like, ‘I'm tired. I don't have the energy.’ But I was also thinking about the planning processes for a memorial service, where time feels very suspended. 

TS: The sense of isolation that I see in all of this brings up the grief for me. It's a silhouetted figure in a warm room and everything surrounding her is warm. There is the very bright strobing light through the window that puts you entirely in silhouette and erases our ability to see what's on the other side. You can see what's out the window, but the viewer is not able to. That's also underscoring the sort of loneliness, the isolation of the figure and that sense of just waiting, that impending sense that grief often gives us: feeling as if maybe this won’t be true and the loss might not still be there; that sense of waiting for the inevitable that's not really coming. All that comes through so strongly in these videos because this sense of grief dissolves. 

We're all really aware of how time can be warped by this pandemic, and create a sense of isolation, loss, and alienation. You were showing us 10 years beforehand, about how dissociative this isolation can be and how it manifests in the body in a way where everything collapses into itself. 

DMH: When I first watched this, I don't remember feeling sad for her that no one came. There's something about the fact that she is dressed up beautifully at home by herself. It’s like it's a choice that she's made. And to some extent, I felt like she was isolated, but at the same time, she's still completely present. 

That’s interesting about time, the pandemic and isolation; that makes a ton of sense. Even though this piece was created a decade ago, you could show it now and people wouldn’t know, because 2020 has changed everything. I actually had to come up with some terminology for that level of unmoored suspension: I call it atemporal disembodiment. 

Now, I think, this video really captures that sense of dread. Whereas when I first saw this piece a while ago, I knew that mourning was in the title, but for some reason I just didn't read it that way. It just felt incredibly contemplative to me and that this was a space of her own on her terms. 

ARW: Now that you're saying that, it's making me think of Blackness: we're just ready, dressed like we are ready, even though the world is not yet wanting us to be ready. 

KJB: It’s Cornel West who says he wears a three piece suit, to be ready for burial, like he's always dressed for the death march. 

There's something else that's coming through as well, about the temporality, because all of your pieces have a different time frame where they were made. But they are all speaking very directly to this moment. Toby, you couldn't have anticipated that Black Tears from 2014 would be doing what it is today. 

TS: No, I was thinking about Michael Brown and the subsequent murders after that. I didn't really think this piece would have the legs that it does, sadly, or that people would apply this overwhelming grief to completely unrelated things.

KJB: Part of what can be lost when you're not paying attention to particular practices is that all of these pieces are abstract. The viewer can come in and do that work. It feels like for Black artists, and especially for women of color, the expectation is: ‘be clear as a bell, or, I really don't know what to do with it.’ Each of your pieces make people pause and contemplate. 

TS: What I love about your conception of abstraction is that abstraction demands more of the viewer. It requires an active engagement of the viewer's imagination, and a projection. I love how you summarize that: the job of abstraction is to require more of the viewer. 

I think this moment that you're creating a parallel. The pandemic, which we know has disproportionately affected Black and brown people, I don't know what the numbers are at this moment in time, but we're hovering somewhere around half a million people who are dead in this country, disproportionately Black and brown people. To emphasize the sense of grief, if that were not enough, and it certainly is -- many of those people died alone. 

Many of their loved ones were not able to comfort them, nor were they even able to hold a memorial or a funeral service where people could come together and have that collective expression of grief. What I was really interested in six or seven years ago with Black Tears, we've been robbed of: we don't have that opportunity to come together in support of community. 

Zoom is not the same. There was a memorial for a dear friend of mine who lost her mother. I guess it's been over a month now. And we got a link to the Zoom memorial and I logged on so that I could attend. But of course, unless you have a pro version, Zoom limits the number of people that can log on, as well as the duration. And so I felt thwarted. I couldn't even participate because I wasn't within that window of the first 100 people in the call. There's so many ways, so many new sort of forms of grief that we're experiencing now, that’s part of the disorientation.

DMH: There's something to be said for ritual, and for clocks and watches. There's something to be said for going to church on Sunday and Sunday dinner, or going to a prayer meeting in the middle of the week. Whatever those things are that add meaning to the lives of Black folks, that aren’t available to us now, because usually we would be at a repast with one another, or we could go over with a pot of soup or something and sit and hold one another's hand. This particular moment has robbed of us these things -- you’re right. 

KJB: This discussion about the pandemic leads me to my final question, which is both simple but also large. How has your art changed, or how do you see it changing from this past year forward? Within that, what did you learn about yourself in this past year? 

DMH: I learned that I do not have to feel like an impostor. As a result of the pandemic, I fell into a really deep depression and that atemporal disembodiment thing was creeping up. And the only way that I could get around that heaviness was to go to the studio and make myself work.

I was too overwhelmed to make a large piece, but I had smaller paper laying around the studio and I just got to working on that. And I could finish a couple of drawings in one night. And I was like, ‘Girl, we can handle this. You can keep the pistons going if we just show up to this damn studio.’ And inevitably, when I would leave the studio, I felt lighter. So what that told me is that it's not just about wanting to make art or investigate questions. I actually need to make art. It is my sanity check. That became quite clear to me.

ARW: I mentioned that half of my work is photographing my family, and I haven't been able to do that. That was part of the plan last year. And to be honest, the last time that I went to photograph my family, my mother's husband, who passed away this past July, actually accompanied us to rural east Texas, while I photographed a family cemetery. My grandmother and great-grandmother are buried there. I took a photograph of him, like he was protecting me. It's very scary, just imagine a cemetery in the middle of the Texas woods, with a one way road. I look back on these photographs and feel like this is so weird, because I had a photograph of another relative, in that cemetery, looking at my camera, who eventually passed away. I was like, ‘I cannot show anybody this image because it's too creepy for me to look at.’

My mom said, ‘Don't you remember that sound happening when you two were there?’ She said that the wind just started blowing. And I said, ‘No, I don't remember that.’  And I wish I had recorded that sound, because there was a really large tree that had fallen down after a bad storm, I think maybe a week or so before that. It’s just about becoming aware of these moments that maybe I would have ignored, and we have to acknowledge. 

When I lived in Massachusetts, I did a series called Splitting. So I'm thinking of splitting with mental health issues, but also trying to divide yourself between locations. In Connecticut, now, I’ve been trying to figure out, ‘How can I do this, and even process that loss?’ And I have been a little bit stuck. I really think 2021 is going to be about forcing myself, when I feel like it, to do very personal things: like for my own bodily health, because it's something that's really occupying my time from the beginning of 2020, even before the pandemic. I think that will help me broaden my practice, since I can't always safely go back home. 

TS: I think throughout the pandemic and everything we've been talking about, I haven't so much learned a lesson as I've had an opportunity to reinforce something. I trust myself. And that just comes with all this gray hair and time, knowing that even if I feel a sense of stuckness, even if I'm not prolific at this moment, there's a difference between quitting and stopping. 

The idea that I trust myself to be able to take this time to process what's swirling around. It's not that events are kickstarting an idea, and then I can't stop producing. It can be events that are swirling around me that I have to meditate on; that I have to think about and reflect on and process. And that can be slow. That could be a year. It could be two years. I fundamentally trust myself that on the other side I'm going to be able to create things. I'm not going to quit working. But I’m stopping right now because I have so much to process. I want to be present in listening and watching. It’s just an overwhelming amount of information that's coming at us, which is ironic considering how isolated we are. But I'm using this time and I trust that I'm making art, even if it's all just happening in my head, rather than right here, right now.