VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

 Thesis: An exploration of the body through garment, particularly in the ways that one can touchand be touched by an absent other. In an exploration of the  written essay form,  the relationship between the past and the present is enacted, with the empty garment as a medium. Particular attention is paid to historical garments in the setting of a history museum, considering the experience of the museum visitor, object display, and conservation of artifacts. The execution hood of Lewis Powell, hanged for his participation in the asassination of Abraham Lincoln, will function as a tangible demonstration of the theoretical concerns.

Research Interests: Garment History and Theory, Visual Anthropology, Vernacular Photography, Personal Narrative and Performative Writing.

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Igneous

When I was five I was going to be a geologist. Once I finally figured out how to say it properly, the word felt like one of those big flat stones I liked to put in my mouth, weighing down my tongue and sending streams of iron ore saliva down the back of my throat. Sometimes pregnant women eat dirt for the minerals, or chalk or clay. I was not pregnant, nor was I a woman; I was just five. The thought of eating clay never had much appeal, the texture seems close to disgusting things like avocados or octopus parts. Dirt and chalk were not much better, like a dry cookie, with no milk. Besides, I never wanted to eat the rocks, just set them in my mouth, gingerly placed next to baby teeth, avoiding the scrape of calcium against rough surface. I could see the stone diminishing as it came in contact with the juices in my mouth, like the stomach of a snake devouring an animal whole. I was shrinking stones with my body.

Once, on a dare, I did swallow a handful of river pebbles, those tiny round baubles that sit in the bottoms of untended dentist office aquariums, turning green with algae; except these were from a real river, the one behind my house, which you could only get to if you  crawl under the fence and slide down the path with all the mud and the roots that smack you on the side of your knee as you tumble down—that river. But that river isn’t really a river, it just looked like one when I was five, really it was just a creek, or maybe even a drainage ditch, but probably not because the water was moving, and when I got the pebbles it wasn’t even raining.  I swallowed because my brother said I wouldn’t, and I liked it when he was wrong. So I choked down some rocks, thinking of owl pellets and how you can recreate the bodies of entire animals, without the flesh of course, but all the hair and bones and moveable parts, thinking that maybe if I was an owl, my pellets would hold the potential to recreate entire aquatic scenes, or perhaps the secrets of the history of the earth. I didn’t stop to think that I was consuming the oldest thing I would ever eat.  I don’t remember thinking much of anything, actually, just focusing on the surprisingly difficult task of swallowing without chewing. I should have washed them down with koolaid or something, but it all happened so fast, and I was five, and planning ahead was not my specialty. I keep saying stones, but I should probably say gravel, my brother was smart enough to know that I should not be swallowing stones much larger than pop rocks. He was smart enough to know that a stone caught in my nose would attract attention, though not smart enough to imagine the extra weight on a little girl with a belly full of rocks. I later added to this weight by filling my pockets with more rocks, a baby Virginia Woolf, though luckily this river was too shallow to be much of a problem if I fell in, and besides, I never could carry so many rocks that I couldn’t get back up again if I fell over.  I learned to sew, despite my protestations that geologists do not sew, because my mom refused to spend any more time mending my pockets, and we were a family who did not throw things away. If I wanted to fill my pockets with rocks I would have to fix the ripped seams myself, with a big darning needle and yarn used for sewing on those cards with holes pre punched so that you can “embroider” the shape of an apple on a piece of cardboard. I moved from fixing pockets to adding more pockets, filling them with more stones every day, building a pile under the left corner of my bed that soon spilled out across the floor and into my closet. When the air got too sticky to talk to anyone I would reorganize my rocks by color or shape or the way they felt under my toes if I balanced my whole body on their surface. I built mountains and highways and houses and families of rock parents and rock children, kissing sharp rock lips on smooth rock cheeks when the babies were tucked into their rock beds at night.

I wanted to be a geologist because I liked the way that the word tasted and I liked the way that rocks would sit there and not say anything but still be there if you went to the bathroom and came back. Or that they could be complicated, because they were so old and that I could be complicated because I was so short and it didn’t really matter to either of us. I liked that I could name a rock one thing the next day and another the day after that and it would still listen to me, and if I still wanted to be a geologist when I got older I could just use all the same rocks because unlike squirrels or hamsters the rocks wouldn’t get old and die, they’d just keep getting older and older. I liked igneous rocks best because they were made from an explosion, but igneous rocks were hard to find in northern ohio. I once asked my mom why we didn’t live somewhere with volcanoes, and she told me that it was because we would then live somewhere with volcanoes, which, to be honest, made a certain amount of sense, even to a five year old. So I focused my efforts on metamorphic rocks, which were easier to find anyway, and didn’t flake into a dusty mess in my pockets, the way sedimentary rocks tended to do, especially once they got stuck under all the others. My dad tried to make jokes about buying me rolling stones records, but I didn’t think his jokes were very funny and I tried to patiently explain to him that real rock music sounds like nothing to us, except maybe if we had extra hearing like wolves do, we could hear noises that sound like whales amplified, which is of course the whale music. But he wouldn’t listen the right way and said he couldn’t hear anything and just went back to making dumb jokes, so I went back to my room and rearranged my rocks. I should have known that it was too hot to talk to people that day anyway.

For
She is my mermaid of the river whose direction was changed a hundred years ago. Her scales are tin-can shiny with a protective jacket of wax paper for when it rains and the ground leaches a sludge of dubious origin into already turbulent waters. She drinks this liquid like she likes it, like it is a milkshake with extra chocolate ice cream for good behavior, but I think it can’t be all that delicious anyway, and it probably still rots the teeth. She is my guide through the city of bones that lay in sheets and blankets on this filthy riverbed. We wander through the skyscrapers of fibula and float over the mountains of femurs, disturbing underwater dust that follows us in sycophantic clouds. The cattle kings should have piled their debris on Division street and at least then we would have something to sled down when it is so god forsaken cold here. Instead, they threw bones in water and made obstacle courses for fish. Maybe these bone cities are like the subdivisions that keep popping up like pimples; though bone is stronger than sheetrock, especially the bones of milk fed cows. Still, despite sturdy housing, it took the fish a while to return- what with their own private Chernobyl happening right under our bathtubs, and no media attention whatsoever. Fish were drowning in the water, which is usually a sign of somewhere beyond disaster. It must have been alarming to see piles of silver floating on water, though it could hardly have been called water at that point. Even Judas could have walked on this river. Now days, this old maiden mer-girl gives guided tours to the great grandchildren of the survivors, those that filled their gills with what oxygen was left and swam for all they were worth. Foreign fish wander through the bone city, their occasional gasps of terror manifest in forests of tiny bubbles rising to the surface in clusters that, on the murky water begin to look like that Japanese bubble tea that nobody likes, even though they still drink it anyway.