In the past my work has come from a place of peaceful, joyful, or impassive reflection. My approach to my subject matter has shifted dramatically over the past months, reflecting a recent series of escalating tragedies within my family, and smaller scale ones within my personal space and life. In a previous studio visit I discussed the idea of small horrors- I find myself reflecting on media created for children. I propose that these small horrors are created to inoculate, while existing as manifestations of societal and cultural trauma. My work moving forward will, somewhat selfishly, serve as a method and workspace for dealing with grief and unfairness. I am hopeful that I can create spaces and work that are accessible, and that resonate with people who are encountering some of these same horrors, small or large.

I’d like to understand through consumption and conversation why these animators and artists are so intent in depicting hells, demons, monsters, and adversaries as a rite of passage. Why do we feel this is necessary, and are we correct when we assume it is necessary to create these trauma vaccines?

• Why portals? Why do we require divisions? How are their depictions important?

• What changes, what remains the same, when passing through a portal?

• How thin a boundary, how short a time is a portal?

Lewis Thomas

The Lives of a Cell

We continue to share with our remotest ancestors the most tangled and evasive attitudes about death, despite the great distance we have come in understanding some of the profound aspects of biology. We have as much distaste for talking about personal death as for thinking about it; it is an indelicacy, like talking in mixed company about venereal disease or abortion in the old days. Death on a grand scale does not bother us in the same special way: we can sit around a dinner table and discuss

war, involving 60 million volatilized human deaths, as though we were talking about bad weather; we can watch abrupt bloody death every day, in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear. It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close, that we begin to think in scurrying circles. At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one's own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable. We may be even less willing to face the issue at first hand than our predecessors because of a secret new hope that maybe it will go away. We like to think, hiding the thought, that with all the marvelous ways in which we seem now to lead nature around by the nose, perhaps we can avoid the central problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter. "The long habit of living," said Thomas Browne, "indisposeth us to dying." These days, the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living; the tenacity of its grip on us, and ours on it, grows in intensity. We cannot think of giving it up, even when living loses its zest---even when we have lost the zest for zest.

We have come a long way in our technologic capacity to put death off, and it is imaginable that we might learn to stall it for even longer periods, perhaps matching the life-spans of the Abkhasian Russians, who are said to go on, springily, for a century and a half. If we can rid ourselves of some of our chronic, degenerative diseases, and cancer, strokes, and coronaries, we might go on and on. It sounds attractive and reasonable, but it is no certainty. If we became free of disease, we would make a much better run of it for the last decade or so, but might still terminate on about the same schedule as now. We may be like the genetically different lines of mice, or like Hayflick's different tissue-culture lines, programmed to die after a pre- determined number of days, clocked by their genomes. If this is the way it is, some of us will continue to wear out and come unhinged in the sixth decade, and some much later, depending on genetic timetables.

If we ever do achieve freedom from most of today's diseases, or even complete freedom from disease, we will perhaps terminate by drying out and blowing away on a light breeze, but we will still die.

Most of my friends do not like this way of looking at it. They prefer to take it for granted that we only die because we get sick, with one lethal ailment or another, and if we did not have our diseases we might go on indefinitely. Even biologists choose to think this about themselves, despite the evidences of the absolute inevitability of death that surround their professional lives. Everything dies, all around, trees, plankton, lichens, mice, whales, flies, mitochondria. In the simplest creatures it is sometimes difficult to see it as death, since the strands of replicating DNA they leave behind are more conspicuously the living parts of themselves than with us (not that it is fundamentally any different, but it seems so). Flies do not develop a ward round of diseases that carry them off, one by one. They simply age, and die, like flies.

We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we

have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one's watch.

Perhaps we would not be so anxious to prolong life if we did not detest so much the sickness of withdrawal. It is astonishing how little information we have about this universal process, with all the other dazzling advances in biology. It is almost as though we wanted not to know about it. Even if we could imagine the act of death in isolation, without any preliminary stage of being struck down by disease, we would be fearful of it.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

The book Bluets, by Maggie Nelson approaches the colour blue from many angles.

I am experimenting with finding a colour for myself.

NARCISSE, Manitoba —Tokyo has its cherry blossoms, the Netherlands has its tulip fields, and Paris offers itself. But the Canadian province of Manitoba has a remarkably distinct springtime attraction too: tens of thousands of amorous snakes writhing around in pits.

Otherwise, Narcisse itself is a near ghost town. The town’s most prominent features are a long-abandoned gas station next to the collapsed ruin of a house.

…

While the snakes don’t hiss or rattle, the sheer number of them rubbing against each other and the bottom of the den creates a sound Mr. Sustrik said was like “the wind rustling through the trees — but louder.”

The snakes around Narcisse have not always been regarded as a natural wonder. Many of the first European settlers tried to exterminate them. They were long harvested for pet stores and companies that supply dissection subjects for schools, leading to fears in the late 1980s that the snakes’ numbers might fall dramatically.

Austen, Ian. “Canada’s Great Snake Awakening” The New York Times, 16 June 2019

Massed Life

I am investigating the significance of quantity when viewing lifeforms. Where does disgust begin? The index these snakes and other massed life represent is that of abundance and joy. There is a clear denotation: there are resources, there is life, life abounds. The connotation, at a certain point, becomes an indicator of decay. When does this begin, which forms of life are explicitly icons of decay, and which are exempt?