During 2023, Art historian and Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Alpesh Kantilal Patel served as Curator at Large at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, NY. Over the year, they organized a series of exhibitions culminating with a group show entitled “Form and Formless: Constellations of Knowledge.” Patel wrote an essay to accompany the show and organized the works of 18 participating artists into thematic “Constellations”. In the essay, Patel describes one of my two pieces in the show, Heavy/Hollow v.2:
“…Shulman’s poignant site-specific installation Hollow/Heavy v.2, [is] comprised of handmade rope, reed, and dyed elastic, that indirectly speaks of the precarious condition of her corporeal body after a miscarriage as being hollow yet still appearing as full. The work leads one to conclude that the becoming of life and the becoming of death are one and the same.”
All three of the shows Patel curated at UrbanGlass were organized under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans Subjectivity.” As a response to Patel’s assertion that Heavy/Hollow illustrates a facet of “forever becoming”: the endlessly connected and cyclical relationship of life and death, I revisited Heavy/Hollow.
The sameness Patel asserts of “becoming of life and becoming of death” maps directly on to the iterative making process I have come to center my studio work around. After installing Heavy/Hollow v.2 in Brooklyn, I returned to Detroit and re-made the components of the sculpture: I knitted a new circular belly-like shape and constructed a new oblong and inflated form made of dyed basket reed.
While the process and components of constructing v.3 remained unchanged, my relationship to what I was making shifted as a result of my new physical reality: I started making v.3 at four months pregnant with a healthy fetus. My body felt heavy as a result of weight gain but certainly not hollow. Instead of the physical emptiness I experienced in the days and weeks following an abortion procedure months before, I was experiencing new physical sensations during construction including the early signs of fetal movement, the flickers and bubbling that are often referred to as “quickening”. The first time I installed Heavy/Hollow v.3, I was seven months pregnant and had to negotiate the reality of experiencing an even heavier and fuller body as I climbed ladders, connected components and positioned spot lights.
I shared images of the completed installation and Patel commented: “...[the piece] also doubles as a precarious cradle”, an observation that was immediately reorienting for me. Patel’s expansive interpretation of the new installation made me realize that I could continue to engage with Heavy/Hollow by making and remaking its parts and installing the components in ways that could reflect my ever changing corporeality. The heavy belly depicted in Heavy/Hollow v.2, morphed into what Patel described as a “cradle”, the hollow basket form, which in v.2 had represented my hollow body cavity, devoid of life after an abortion now read as a small form, held, by the knit framework. Perhaps knowing the story of loss behind Heavy/Hollow allowed Patel to interpret the relationship of components in v.3 as both different and the same as the becoming of life and death is, afterall, precarious.
I understand now that the “forever becoming” of life and death does not have to exist as a circular shape or trace a fixed path, instead it can map a continuum of experiences and realities that I will be able to ground in material components that when joined and installed can mark moments in time by representing bodily forms: belly, womb, ribs, interior cavity, guts etc that tell a story of a specific experience. I will continue to revisit Heavy/Hollow and allow the work to reflect different realities of my body as it transverses the möbius strip-like process of living and dying.
