How long have you been carrying around that moment?
2019
Video Documentation of Performance
Dimensions Variable
I created the work How long have you been carrying that moment? to talk about this burden that we place on ourselves, the weight of guilt, loss, and labor. It is a video documentation of a performance, projected on to the wall, in which I am carrying a seven-pound, solid glass form which resembles a seed, over the mountain pass between Copper Mountain and Vail Mountain. She went to a small mountain clinic in Copper presenting with severe abdominal pains. Upon swift examination, the doctors quickly found that she was in labor and had to be rushed over to Vail Hospital which was a twenty-minute drive away. Up until this point, she had not known that she was pregnant and at that moment, everything changed for her. I think about how terrified she had to have been and that I forever changed her life. I wanted to focus on that moment of realization and impact that it must have had. It was important to me to recreate the trek between these two places to pay homage to her sacrifice. I reenacted the imagined labor by carrying the glass piece to recreate my own perception of labor and document my burden as she must have carried for years after the fact. The hike was fifteen miles and took seven hours, one minute, and thirty-seconds to complete.
I made the glass piece the same weight I was when I was born to function as a parallel to the physicality of her bearing my weight. The glass piece was especially important for this work as it was meant to represent myself as a baby. Being made of clear glass, it absorbs the environment around it to assume its surrounding as to comment on nurture versus nature. It is made of glass and is not made from the environment that it is placed in, however it projects its surroundings. Additionally, I created a shape that resembled that of a seed and a womb to reference the beginnings of life.
My body ached and my muscles became weaker throughout the performance from the heaviness of the glass piece. I feel guilty for causing her both physical and emotional pain, for tearing into her body and heart. This work functions to both help myself overcome the overwhelming sense of guilt, the painful memories of my past, and to empathize with my birth mother in the best way I know how, through art.