I am thankful to say we have faired well through this latest round of fires...
I had completely lost my shit multiple times in absolute fear, triggered by my past evacuation experience. There have been multiple fires since the Palisades and Eaton fires that created a complete hell-scape for so so so many people. Erasing their homes, security and sense of identity.
I have never been a real organized person; I thrive in chaotic environments it seems. I like to have a lot to look at, be surrounded by and feel enrobed in. This makes for a cozy environment, a creative looking home and wild artmaking. Many times needing to protect the finished works from myself because I have created a huge mess making it. Storing it out of the way while I clear the clutter that created it.
I have been the final stop for the families photographs, a century of them! I hold the responsibility of caring for them and that responsibility has recently created a heavy burden. With each evacuation, I have grabbed them and have often forgotten my own wedding photo, or some other precious item. To help me work through the constant onslaught of sadness, fear and grief from the fires and the election I started scanning all the images. I can share them with my cousins and niblings. That way I would not be the only one to hold them and there will be other locations to view them/save them.
These photographs are some of my most precious memories with my grandmother and great Aunt, as they were the ones who made most the albums. Using the photos, or snaps as they called them, as a sort of trophy of times spent. They would have gotten on the social media bandwagon had it been around when they were younger. My grandmother printed everything, wrote the name of the people in them and until the prints were dated by the photo developers, she dated many of them and glued them into albums. Spending days scanning them is like spending times with my grandmother again, It turned into an emotional, sacred and bittersweet experience, as I was scanning the 100's of photos I started wondering if I was the only one who these images really mattered to. Does anyone else really care about them? Will these memories die with me?
Last week I went to a dinner with fellow women artists, hosted in a home of a ceramic artist. One of the attending artists lives in Los Angeles and spoke about her experience during the first days of the fires...recounting how on the second morning she went outside to assess the smoke and the sky turned dark and it began to rain pages from books! She said they were recipes, songs, hand written pages falling from the sky...these pages had traveled 10+ miles and were falling in her front yard.
I had read an article that more artworks had been lost in these two fires than ever before. The loss of artwork is monumental and has left many artists without homes, studios and their life's works both in process and finished gone forever.
I can only imagine it from what I had experienced but I can not imagine the profound sadness, fear and emptiness that the fleeing created in each unique experience. The loss of generational wealth, memories, personal space, HOME...I can empathize, but I am reminded it will last for generations.
We sat with each other, talking about our fears, concerns, shock and how to move forward from this point. All of us shared ways we disassociate when things get to be too much. At one point, I suggested we take a group photo with my instant camera. All agreed and after balancing the camera on many different surfaces and makeshift tripods, I was able to get a group photo. I mentioned the silliness was like being in a slumber party and that made all the ladies giggle with memories of time gone by. A photo was captured of me, bending in half to try and see through the viewfinder for one of the photos.
It was called the "human tripod"
Between the fires, staying off social media for a week to regain some sense of calm to focus, I came up for air just in time for the ICE raids today in my town! I know the next 100 days will just be shock after shock in an effort to make us all apathetic and so burnt out we don't respond anymore...but it is not going to happen. I know others that feel the same and it is in those people who I set my light to.
Although I am super callused and done with a lot of things
I am still fragile but also believe in magic
even amongst all the back to back existential crises
No comments:
Post a Comment