I am acquainted with the night.
Unlike Robert Frost’s poems’ protagonist who reflects on their experience of being lost in the urban streets of isolation, sorrow, and despair, I have found myself “still looking down the saddest city lane.” The night I am acquainted with is a persistent reality, a living history of my body, which was left transformed—marked, after experiencing two miscarriages.
In his analysis of Frost’s poem, the literary critic Nasrullah Mambrol highlights the importance of the word acquaintance, explaining “there is a certain knowledge and familiarity without intimacy. An acquaintance is not a friend.”
This body of work explores the unfriendly knowledge and familiarity of the two losses that imprinted on my physical body, made, perhaps, as an attempt for my mind to reconcile an unexpected reality. A few of these pieces were started while I was still carrying my first pregnancy, and I employed my material language to imagine the anticipated growth and expansion of my abdomen.
Elastic bra strapping and found textiles were used to wrap armature, wind rope and knit skin-like plains to cover swollen objects both found and created. I often rely on traditional basket making techniques to build armature. I experienced my first loss in the middle of constructing two sculptures–they morphed from forms reflecting a current and expected physical reality to ones that I could only imagine.
My body has been marked by these losses. After undergoing an abortion, a healthcare procedure to ensure I would not become sick from unresponsive fetal tissue, I retained a physical fullness but was emptied of growth. As a response, I have been making knotted skin-like nets that stretch over structures, some made of dyed basket reed. These forms are useless baskets, they are expanded but can’t and won’t hold. The nets are stretched so taut that they don’t hold as much as they brace–they aim to reflect the physical discomfort of my expanded and empty body.
Expanded/empty, Heavy/Hollow, I use alliteration to put words to this work that explores a mournful embodied experience. Often used as a literary device to draw out emotion and infuse lyricality, I use alliteration and closely connected words and their lulling qualities to create short incantations that are meant to note the quiet, painful paradox of my bodily reality.
While Frost’s narrator “stood still and stopped the sound of feet '' to take in the whole of their difficult experience, I knit, knot, wrap and build to take in mine.
