http://www.naominatale.net/untitled-inquiry-1 daily 0.75 2025-10-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461819545595-6BL7C9JD5KADWBPGSAS4/_X1A0505web.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? definitions (detail) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461819545595-6BL7C9JD5KADWBPGSAS4/_X1A0505web.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? definitions (detail) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461360543041-KF3OL2MMQVT8STV2L3RU/_X1A0431smallweb.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? definitions (detail)   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462396976734-R70BV9WTU7U60AQUZPHT/blankslide.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? You, I—we—emerge from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable. Dis-membered and re-membered; measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrevocable. Irrelevant? Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: be careful. Crossing the surface, our tread imprints in the texture of the soil: scores of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a record that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soils of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, layered. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow I assumed that the past was retrievable. That it was available, waiting even. There to be navigated, read, this atlas, a prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. I was mistaken. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. You can continue or not.   For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, re-collected, re-membered and then re-placed on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with it all; all that mass, all that matter. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could envision laying that weight in. And it was in those dreams that I first asked this question, does anything go away? Three years later I break ground, and through my body begin a digging practice to consider this question. I make space in this practice to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the exact words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It's a history that is as devastating and ruinous as its relic; a box made to put a body away, now deteriorating and decomposing around plastic adornments fully intact. I’ve never seen anything so honest. Is it possible the story of everything is a story of juxtaposition? If so, this casket describes it exquisitely. I succumb to the grief and weight of it. It makes me ache. Unsettled, it’s the discomfort, the dis-ease which calls me to buy it, to live with it. I know there is something to learn from it, and when it becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. This seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears ineffable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas bag to put it in. I place the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil: this void. I wonder, how could one, I—we, traverse that space? What would that take? How does anyone reconsider the means which they measure significance by? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and explore the meaning of words. Another more pressing question emerges: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This question devours me. I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such labor demands. I hang the dress in a room with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition for a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it; ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this definition and the vacant line in front of it are of inexplicable import. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico, I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and dig there, where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after naming her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring for her. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day, as experienced through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I am overcome with a need to sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down—with hands and paper—to reveal them. This act of sanding is significant, it is work that I must be doing every day. A way to get closer, pointing me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with, that reside on the surface of our lives, impressions that my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious. It needs to be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a throbbing in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and worked over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, fields where justice was deserted and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country because of their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle, in an ongoing war. As an act of preservation, I construct a box to place these artifacts and dig out a cavity in the earth that will hold it all. The box; a vessel to carry them over another lifetime, over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and then buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle down until it is the same size as the one from the collection. I will work this one myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to experience and shape my own relationship to this object because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how I could “feel" a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, what does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. I have faith that the inquiry is worthy, but nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I know I could dig forever and it would still never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. These relationships are tedious, exhausting and consequential. And though it’s that process of engaging in them that allows me to further consider my place and role in this world, I am beginning to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind, attentive to their subtle alterations and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand, and weld, and wear away as a practice of presence. I question now if each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. That the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an enormous, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. And I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This I believe is my ground-zero. I—we—emerge from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable. Dis-membered and re-membered; measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrevocable. Irrelevant? Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: be careful, You. n. May 02, 2016     https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593541837-WGDU5U0ZKL9XLBEGOQSB/20180629_1471.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? unnamed https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461367144041-C4NUL9RIBG45I8KU9J7H/definitionlongwebsmall9.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? unnamed https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461819540685-E0TS83MGIA2UL5POM1FE/_X1A0547web.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? digging https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461819534131-UGYIMA0CMA22GENC4H1C/_X1A0498web.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? digging https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196466635-U7M1HX3JSB9LBMZ6MCGC/casket2smallwebcolor.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462394715943-1XYNY7JGT29HHRF1GAAK/blankslide.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away?   You, May 02, 2016 I—we—emerge from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable. Dis-membered and re-membered; measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrevocable. Irrelevant? Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: Be Careful. Crossing the surface, our tread imprints in the texture of the soil: scores of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a record that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soils of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, Layered. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow, I assumed that the past was retrievable. That it was available, waiting even. There to be navigated, read, this atlas, a prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. Somehow I was mistaken. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. It is your choice to continue… or not.   For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, recollected, remembered and then replaced on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with it all; all that mass, all that matter. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could envision laying that weight in. And it was in those dreams that I first asked this question, does anything go away? Three years later I break ground, and through my body begin a digging practice to consider this question. I make space in this repeated practice to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the exact words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It is a story that is as devastating and ruinous as its relic; a box made to put a body away, now deteriorating and decomposing around plastic adornments fully intact. I’ve never seen anything so honest. Is it possible the story of everything is a story of juxtaposition? If so, this casket describes it so exquisitely. I succumb to the grief and weight of it. It makes me ache. Unsettled, it’s the discomfort, the dis-ease, which requires me to buy it and live with it. I know there is something to learn from it, and when it becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. This seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears ineffable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas sack to put it in. I place the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil: this void. I wonder, how do we traverse that space? What would that take? How might we reconsider our means of measuring significance? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and explore the meaning of words. Another more pressing question emerges: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This question devours me. I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such labor demands. I hang the dress in a room with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition for a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this definition and its vacant line are of inexplicable import. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico, I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and dig where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after naming her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring for her. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day as experienced, through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I am overcome with a need to sand down to something. I know instantly that the sanding, like the digging is important. I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down, with hands and paper, to reveal them. It is the act of sanding that is significant, work that I must also be doing every day. A way to get closer, pointing me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with, that reside on the surface of our lives, impressions that my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious. It needs to be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a throbbing in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, fields where justice was deserted and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country because of their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle in what is still an ongoing war. In an act of preservation, I construct a box to place these storied artifacts and dig out a cavity in the earth to hold it all, a vessel to carry them over another lifetime: over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and then buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle down until it is the same size as the one from the collection. I will work this one myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to form and shape my own relationship to this object because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. I hold faith that the inquiry is worthy, but nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I know I could dig forever and it would still never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. These relationships are tedious, exhausting and consequential. And though it’s that process of engaging in them that allows me to further consider my place and role in this world I am beginning to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind attentive to their subtle alterations and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand, and weld, and wear away, as a practice of presence. I wonder now if each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. That the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an enormous, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. And I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This may be my beginning. I, we. Emerged from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable now. Dismembered and re-membered, measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrelevant? Irrevocable. Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: Be Careful.     https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196614972-OPQVOKET4LL838T3E8PR/IMG_8742-colorweb8.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461786632876-YX9SPKOLW43HG6R9DZ42/blankslide.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? You, May 02, 2016 I—we—emerge from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable. Dis-membered and re-membered; measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrevocable. Irrelevant? Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: Be Careful. Crossing the surface, our tread imprints in the texture of the soil: scores of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a record that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soils of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, Layered. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow, I assumed that the past was retrievable. That it was available, waiting even. There to be navigated, read, this atlas, a prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. Somehow I was mistaken. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. It is your choice to continue… or not.   For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, recollected, remembered and then replaced on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with it all; all that mass, all that matter. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could envision laying that weight in. And it was in those dreams that I first asked this question, does anything go away? Three years later I break ground, and through my body begin a digging practice to consider this question. I make space in this repeated practice to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the exact words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It is a story that is as devastating and ruinous as its relic; a box made to put a body away, now deteriorating and decomposing around plastic adornments fully intact. I’ve never seen anything so honest. Is it possible the story of everything is a story of juxtaposition? If so, this casket describes it so exquisitely. I succumb to the grief and weight of it. It makes me ache. Unsettled, it’s the discomfort, the dis-ease, which requires me to buy it and live with it. I know there is something to learn from it, and when it becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. This seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears ineffable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas sack to put it in. I place the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil: this void. I wonder, how do we traverse that space? What would that take? How might we reconsider our means of measuring significance? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and explore the meaning of words. Another more pressing question emerges: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This question devours me. I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such labor demands. I hang the dress in a room with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition for a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this definition and its vacant line are of inexplicable import. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico, I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and dig where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after naming her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring for her. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day as experienced, through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I am overcome with a need to sand down to something. I know instantly that the sanding, like the digging is important. I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down, with hands and paper, to reveal them. It is the act of sanding that is significant, work that I must also be doing every day. A way to get closer, pointing me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with, that reside on the surface of our lives, impressions that my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious. It needs to be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a throbbing in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, fields where justice was deserted and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country because of their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle in what is still an ongoing war. In an act of preservation, I construct a box to place these storied artifacts and dig out a cavity in the earth to hold it all, a vessel to carry them over another lifetime: over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and then buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle down until it is the same size as the one from the collection. I will work this one myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to form and shape my own relationship to this object because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. I hold faith that the inquiry is worthy, but nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I know I could dig forever and it would still never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. These relationships are tedious, exhausting and consequential. And though it’s that process of engaging in them that allows me to further consider my place and role in this world I am beginning to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind attentive to their subtle alterations and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand, and weld, and wear away, as a practice of presence. I wonder now if each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. That the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an enormous, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. And I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This may be my beginning. I, we. Emerged from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable now. Dismembered and re-membered, measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrelevant? Irrevocable. Complicated. Cleansed? All I know is: Be Careful. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196157070-MSOV0EJREM4YZZKGS2Q3/_X1A1497.CR2smallweb.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461810044624-XYX5DEOXV0F0FT67ZR3W/blankslide5.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? Dear ____________: I share it with a few people. but they don’t seem to understand. Yet I believe this space, _______________: and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether or not we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to find a way to explain this. So I continue on this road. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. With great luck I travel to Florida and I dig there, where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. and realize this is work that needs to be done everyday and therefore worthy of everyday clothing. The road always teaches me. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I wants to raise. But which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming, after the building of the coop, after the appreciation of her eggs, after the living with her, after the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time, -presence, consumption, relationship, value, labor- I imagine it’s all those things in some way. So it’s about building a relationship to the cost of my consumption -all of the things I use everyday. but through one, maybe small, but hopefully meaningful, relationship. I then come to this vision, -that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. So I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like important work, work that I must also be doing everyday. As a way to get closer. To point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but that my privilege prevents me from actually feeling –. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that doesn’t go away.   And the sanding is tedious, as it should be. it strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body. And I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can.   After years of looking for just one, I find a collection of short-handle hoes all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. This will be a gift for my husband whose family used to work hoes like them in the fields as migrant farmworkers, where life is hard and unfair. These hoes were eventually banned in this country for their backbreaking design but only after a long fight and my husband has been holding this history for years. So I make a box to put these hoes and their stories in and dig a space in the ground that will hold this box.   I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle off till it is the same size as the one from the collection, but this one I will work myself, -in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other.. But I want to build a relationship to this object, because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects. And this seems worthwhile   All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question.   I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question:   “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?”   I hold onto this and begin another journey but that I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void…   I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void the void of space, and the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I also know there will always be more questions.     I have many more conversations, and in some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined, in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway.   But I struggle, the question nags at me and I need more. Because I’m is so unsure and because I know this question is important and nothing I’ve done has explained it. And though all of these relationships are about engaging in a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world I begin to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer or refine my question to another person while carrying the political gravity the question deserves. But I’m not ready to leave them, I am committed to them and to the idea I’m carrying in my mind of how they might change or inform me. But this understanding does shift my focus from the question itself to why the question is important and that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning.   Today this where I find myself. At the beginning. Open. completely open… Trying to constantly remind myself that there is a space between everything. And if you consider the space between a question and an answer, how anyone gets from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. Perhaps each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us- if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. The cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. I am part of an invisible system, created far before I was born but inherited and live in the legacy and privilege of. And so I sand and dig as a way to remind myself that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system that was built and shaped in an ideology of white supremacy. To remind myself that I live on occupied land. Which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only through the money I send in as my payment but the through time I spent earning it. For me this is what it means to be present in my relationship to and within this world, as a white privlidged American woman.   This past month I’ve been thinking what does ground-zero look like for me in this investigation. Why does this question matter? You see all this time that I’ve been considering this question I’ve been completely focused on the responsibility of dealing with what it means to live with everything, all the legacies of trauma, to people, to species and to the earth but not knowing how to connect that to myself and to each of us individually. How does one connect to the truth of the past when it is completely inaccessible as it’s so huge and unrecorded in its entirety. And so I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away, what if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We’d then have to accept that Today we are living with them all. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality. This I believe is my ground-zero.   On a whim I went to the grand canyon the other week and it just happened to be the big lady’s 97th birthday. Which is absurd and got me thinking… Because that canyon was around before Time was ever measured. She was here before we ever thought to measure anything. I’m fascinated by measurements and at the same time deeply disturbed by them. Hence the reason for weighing a casket. But all the questions I’m asking require us to measure something out for ourselves and I never thought about it in that way before-at least not so directly, or with words.       Perhaps what I’m searching for is a relationship to better understand where all these measurements and their consequences have brought us, both individually and collectively, -as a community, as a nation, as a planet, -as part of an interconnected living system that is moving ever forward.   As you can see I have no resolutions nor do I hold hope of ever coming to any, all I have is a process, and it is one that is constantly being torn down and rebuilt, that gets refined with each relationship and the awareness of my presence in it. A process to remind myself that every relationship matters no matter how small and seemingly impersonal because in each of them is an opportunity to see ourselves, to face ourselves, to be more present, to offer a space for reciprocation and in that exchange find ourselves ever questioning, ever sanding, ever digging, ever changing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196376871-3KG04M3DMYQTDWGZZJA1/hoespansmallweb.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462345817737-OBWE50T8YR7RGOSNIUWX/blanklandscape.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? You, April 22, 2016 I, we. Emerged from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable now. Dismembered and re-membered, measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrelevant? Irrevocable. Complicated. Cleansed? be Careful. Traversing the surface our footfall imprints in the texture of the soil: granules of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a process that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soil of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, Gorgeous. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow I had assumed that the past was retrievable. An atlas of prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. That it was available, waiting even. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. Somehow I was mistaken. For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, re-collected, re-membered and then re-placed on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with all that mass. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could lay those bones in. And it was in those dreams that I was asking this question, does anything go away? After three years I finally break ground, and through my body I begin a digging practice to consider this question. I dig in soil of all castes and in all places. I dig where there are boulders and roots, where bricks were once laid and sand is resting. I dig to the water line. Within this practice I make room to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the right words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. It is your choice to continue or not. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It is devastating and real. Ruinous as the condition of the box itself. I’ve never seen such an honest object and I’m drawn to it, despite its grief and despite its weight. You see, this was an object that was specifically made to put something away… And yet there it was in front of me, its edifice deteriorating and decomposing next to plastic adornments fully intact. The story of everything is the story of juxtaposition and this casket explains it to me in a way I’ve never absorbed before. It leaves me aching. Unsettled. But it’s the discomfort that eventually calls me and requires me to buy it and live with it. I know there is something for me to learn from it and when the casket becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. Because this seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears irresolvable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I then take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas bag to put it in. I set the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil, it is a void. I wonder, how does one traverse that space? What would that take? How might one reconsider the means by which they measure the significance of anything for themselves? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and examine the meaning of words. A more important question surfaces and I leave the former to ask myself this: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such an experience demands. I hang the dress in a room against and with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition to a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it- ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this vacant line and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue on. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and I dig there. Where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming of her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day- through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I then come to this vision that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. From this, I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like significant work, work that I must also be doing every day. As a way to get closer. As a way to point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but which my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious, as it should be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, where justice was deserted or never born and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country for their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle in what is still an ongoing war. In an act of preservation I construct a box to place these artifacts of record and dig out a cavity in the earth to hold it all, a vessel to carry them over another lifetime, over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe which I saw the handle off until it is the same size as the one from the collection. But this one I will work myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to form and shape my own relationship to this object. Because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. For I know it is is worthy, yet nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I could dig forever and it would never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. For all of these relationships have been in pursuit of a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world, but I’m beginning to understand that none of them can ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind watchful for their subtle shifts and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand and weld and wear away as a practice of presence. I wonder if each of us can only have our own truth and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything, that the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an immense, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This I believe is my beginning. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551465-BPXVIS0QB8MHBNEZ1EFA/hoespansmallweb.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462346596965-65Z635EL1D5BJL8CRPON/blanklandscapetxt.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? You, May 02, 2016 I, we. Emerged from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable now. Dismembered and re-membered, measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrelevant? Irrevocable. Complicated. Cleansed? be Careful. Traversing the surface our footfall imprints in the texture of the soil: granules of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a process that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soil of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, Gorgeous. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow I had assumed that the past was retrievable. An atlas of prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. That it was available, waiting even. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. Somehow I was mistaken. For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, re-collected, re-membered and then re-placed on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with all that mass. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could lay those bones in. And it was in those dreams that I first asked this question, does anything go away? After three years I break ground, and through my body I begin a digging practice to consider this question. I dig in soil of all castes and in all places. I dig where there are boulders and roots, where bricks were once laid and sand is resting. I dig to the water line. Within this practice I make room to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the right words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. It is your choice to continue or not. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It is devastating and real. Ruinous as the condition of the box itself. I’ve never seen such an honest object and I’m drawn to it, despite its grief and despite its weight. You see, this was an object that was specifically made to put something away… And yet there it was in front of me, its edifice deteriorating and decomposing next to plastic adornments fully intact. The story of everything is the story of juxtaposition and this casket explains it to me in a way I’ve never absorbed before. It leaves me aching. Unsettled. But it’s the discomfort that eventually calls me and requires me to buy it and live with it. I know there is something for me to learn from it and when the casket becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. Because this seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears irresolvable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I then take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas bag to put it in. I set the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil, it is a void. I wonder, how does one traverse that space? What would that take? How might one reconsider the means by which they measure the significance of anything for themselves? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and examine the meaning of words. A more important question surfaces and I leave the former to ask myself this: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such an experience demands. I hang the dress in a room against and with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition to a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it- ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this vacant line and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue on. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and I dig there. Where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming of her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day- through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I then come to this vision that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. From this, I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like significant work, work that I must also be doing every day. As a way to get closer. As a way to point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but which my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious, as it should be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, where justice was deserted or never born and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country for their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle in what is still an ongoing war. In an act of preservation I construct a box to place these artifacts of record and dig out a cavity in the earth to hold it all, a vessel to carry them over another lifetime, over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe which I saw the handle off until it is the same size as the one from the collection. But this one I will work myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to form and shape my own relationship to this object. Because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. For I know it is is worthy, yet nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I could dig forever and it would never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. For all of these relationships have been in pursuit of a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world, but I’m beginning to understand that none of them can ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind watchful for their subtle shifts and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand and weld and wear away as a practice of presence. I wonder if each of us can only have our own truth and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything, that the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an immense, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This I believe is my beginning.     https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461810566714-YKIYDQXRVW2CEG1W129R/blankslide6.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? You, April 22, 2016 I, we. Emerged from a history layered, violent, gorgeous, forgotten, unimaginable now. Dismembered and re-membered, measured, unmeasured and re-measured. Irrelevant? Irrevocable. Complicated. Cleansed? be Careful. Traversing the surface our footfall imprints in the texture of the soil: granules of history digested, quite literally, by the earth; a process that is non-partisan, without pretense or omission. Millions of years of matter revisited. How honest. But what of us? I, we. What inclusions compose the soil of our story? A process political. A texture of omissions. Imprints both visible and unseen. Fractured, forgotten, Gorgeous. Difficult to comprehend if walking solely upon the surface. Somehow I had assumed that the past was retrievable. An atlas of prodigious record existing as matter and artifacts of our ongoing experiences. That it was available, waiting even. Somehow I imagined that history could prove itself, that the act of recollection held import. That truth could be fact and science a witness. Somehow I was mistaken. For years I collected bones, literally. A million of them, hand-made by people around the world, in community and in solidarity. A mass grave we made, re-collected, re-membered and then re-placed on the National Mall, because Genocide is ongoing. But the weight of bone and fossil is impossible, and I had never considered what I would do with all that mass. It was in my dreams where I first imagined myself an excavator. Where I saw myself digging, carving a place in the earth I could lay those bones in. And it was in those dreams that I was asking this question, does anything go away? After three years I finally break ground, and through my body I begin a digging practice to consider this question. I dig in soil of all castes and in all places. I dig where there are boulders and roots, where bricks were once laid and sand is resting. I dig to the water line. Within this practice I make room to examine the meaning of words. I write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I continue to search for the right words to ask this question, but I’ve not found them. Words have always failed me. What follows is a story of process, my process. It is personal and not, relevant and not. It is your choice to continue or not. I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop and I inquire of its story. It is devastating and real. Ruinous as the condition of the box itself. I’ve never seen such an honest object and I’m drawn to it, despite its grief and despite its weight. You see, this was an object that was specifically made to put something away… And yet there it was in front of me, its edifice deteriorating and decomposing next to plastic adornments fully intact. The story of everything is the story of juxtaposition and this casket explains it to me in a way I’ve never absorbed before. It leaves me aching. Unsettled. But it’s the discomfort that eventually calls me and requires me to buy it and live with it. I know there is something for me to learn from it and when the casket becomes too heavy, when I cannot live with it anymore, I will bury it. While living with it I note that every day its meaning to me changes. I am overcome by an obsession to weigh it. Because this seems the only measurement I can capture when everything else about it appears irresolvable. The casket weighs 25lbs. I then take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew a canvas bag to put it in. I set the casket and the soil in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil, it is a void. I wonder, how does one traverse that space? What would that take? How might one reconsider the means by which they measure the significance of anything for themselves? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and examine the meaning of words. A more important question surfaces and I leave the former to ask myself this: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such an experience demands. I hang the dress in a room against and with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for. In my investigation of language and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition to a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. This is the definition and the space I made to consider it- ________________: the relation between the condition of (anything) being the consequence of the whole of the past. I share this with some people but they don’t understand. Yet I believe this vacant line and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something as being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue on. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. I travel to Florida and I dig there. Where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, and which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming of her. After building her coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After living with her. After the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. Presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day- through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. I then come to this vision that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. From this, I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like significant work, work that I must also be doing every day. As a way to get closer. As a way to point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but which my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. The sanding is tedious, as it should be. It strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body and I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can. After years of searching for just one, I find a collection of twelve short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in American fields by migrant farmworkers, where justice was deserted or never born and bodies ached for lifetimes. These ground utensils were eventually banned in parts of this country for their backbreaking design, but only after a long battle in what is still an ongoing war. In an act of preservation I construct a box to place these artifacts of record and dig out a cavity in the earth to hold it all, a vessel to carry them over another lifetime, over my own. I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe which I saw the handle off until it is the same size as the one from the collection. But this one I will work myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to form and shape my own relationship to this object. Because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile. All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but which I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined. And in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. Again, What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? This is the question that erodes me. Gnaws on my surfaces. For I know it is is worthy, yet nothing I’ve done has tendered me an explanation. I could dig forever and it would never be enough. Enough, I have no map to you. Maybe I’m lost. For all of these relationships have been in pursuit of a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world, but I’m beginning to understand that none of them can ever ask, answer, or refine my question for another person while carrying the political gravity that the question deserves. Still I am committed to them and carry them in my mind watchful for their subtle shifts and the ways that they will inform me. But this understanding shifts my focus - away from the question itself and toward a consideration of why the question is important. And that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. This road. I stand here now, at the beginning, at last. And open. Acutely aware now that there is a space between everything. Consider with me the space between a question and an answer. How anyone voyages from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. I shovel and move earth, I sand and weld and wear away as a practice of presence. I wonder if each of us can only have our own truth and it is up to us, if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything, that the cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. That my inheritance is a legacy of privilege and power perpetuated by its poorly visible boundaries. And so I physically remove the surface of things as a practice of remembering that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system shaped through the ideologies of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land, which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payments but in the time spent earning them. As a white American woman this is what it means to be present in my relationships to and within this world. I’ve been focusing this inquiry on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything – all the legacies of trauma to people, species and the earth - without knowing how to connect to it myself. For how does one connect to the entirety of an immense, immeasurable and largely unrecorded past? It engulfs me. I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? What if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with all of them. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality, to face each other in that reality? This I believe is my beginning. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461808711239-XH99NU9JHFY09JQY27YM/blankslide2.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461809775786-EENKAXNV9YKIRNGCGD0B/blankslide4.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? Dear ____________: I share it with a few people. but they don’t seem to understand. Yet I believe this space, _______________: and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether or not we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to find a way to explain this. So I continue on this road. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. With great luck I travel to Florida and I dig there, where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. and realize this is work that needs to be done everyday and therefore worthy of everyday clothing. The road always teaches me. I learn to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I wants to raise. But which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming, after the building of the coop, after the appreciation of her eggs, after the living with her, after the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time, -presence, consumption, relationship, value, labor- I imagine it’s all those things in some way. So it’s about building a relationship to the cost of my consumption -all of the things I use everyday. but through one, maybe small, but hopefully meaningful, relationship. I then come to this vision, -that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. So I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like important work, work that I must also be doing everyday. As a way to get closer. To point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but that my privilege prevents me from actually feeling –. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that doesn’t go away.   And the sanding is tedious, as it should be. it strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body. And I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can.   After years of looking for just one, I find a collection of short-handle hoes all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. This will be a gift for my husband whose family used to work hoes like them in the fields as migrant farmworkers, where life is hard and unfair. These hoes were eventually banned in this country for their backbreaking design but only after a long fight and my husband has been holding this history for years. So I make a box to put these hoes and their stories in and dig a space in the ground that will hold this box.   I take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle off till it is the same size as the one from the collection, but this one I will work myself, -in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other.. But I want to build a relationship to this object, because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects. And this seems worthwhile   All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question.   I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question:   “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?”   I hold onto this and begin another journey but that I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void…   I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void the void of space, and the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I also know there will always be more questions.     I have many more conversations, and in some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined, in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway.   But I struggle, the question nags at me and I need more. Because I’m is so unsure and because I know this question is important and nothing I’ve done has explained it. And though all of these relationships are about engaging in a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world I begin to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer or refine my question to another person while carrying the political gravity the question deserves. But I’m not ready to leave them, I am committed to them and to the idea I’m carrying in my mind of how they might change or inform me. But this understanding does shift my focus from the question itself to why the question is important and that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning.   Today this where I find myself. At the beginning. Open. completely open… Trying to constantly remind myself that there is a space between everything. And if you consider the space between a question and an answer, how anyone gets from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. Perhaps each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us- if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. The cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. I am part of an invisible system, created far before I was born but inherited and live in the legacy and privilege of. And so I sand and dig as a way to remind myself that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system that was built and shaped in an ideology of white supremacy. To remind myself that I live on occupied land. Which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only through the money I send in as my payment but the through time I spent earning it. For me this is what it means to be present in my relationship to and within this world, as a white privlidged American woman.   This past month I’ve been thinking what does ground-zero look like for me in this investigation. Why does this question matter? You see all this time that I’ve been considering this question I’ve been completely focused on the responsibility of dealing with what it means to live with everything, all the legacies of trauma, to people, to species and to the earth but not knowing how to connect that to myself and to each of us individually. How does one connect to the truth of the past when it is completely inaccessible as it’s so huge and unrecorded in its entirety. And so I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away, what if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We’d then have to accept that Today we are living with them all. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality. This I believe is my ground-zero.   On a whim I went to the grand canyon the other week and it just happened to be the big lady’s 97th birthday. Which is absurd and got me thinking… Because that canyon was around before Time was ever measured. She was here before we ever thought to measure anything. I’m fascinated by measurements and at the same time deeply disturbed by them. Hence the reason for weighing a casket. But all the questions I’m asking require us to measure something out for ourselves and I never thought about it in that way before-at least not so directly, or with words.       Perhaps what I’m searching for is a relationship to better understand where all these measurements and their consequences have brought us, both individually and collectively, -as a community, as a nation, as a planet, -as part of an interconnected living system that is moving ever forward.   As you can see I have no resolutions nor do I hold hope of ever coming to any, all I have is a process, and it is one that is constantly being torn down and rebuilt, that gets refined with each relationship and the awareness of my presence in it. A process to remind myself that every relationship matters no matter how small and seemingly impersonal because in each of them is an opportunity to see ourselves, to face ourselves, to be more present, to offer a space for reciprocation and in that exchange find ourselves ever questioning, ever sanding, ever digging, ever changing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461808403379-09DHOBVCLUE08DVE32UN/blankslide2.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461807929164-P464MCV1J3T7P1GEUQOZ/blankslide.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461808090410-ZSYTBZOTRANG2163NMJS/blankslide.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? 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https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615674442347-ZZ484DPJHBLPMCRR40VO/Screen+Shot+2021-03-13+at+3.26.11+PM.png HOME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615674433479-JY4CAMTPSF5D0HLKKO55/Screen+Shot+2021-03-13+at+3.23.31+PM.png HOME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615673848090-LJWLU5ICF5CFO8XX8SPY/MusicBoxImage.jpg HOME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461358235053-ZHRHLE4UDJ8A808QKNAM/IMG_8742-colorSMALLWEB.jpg HOME http://www.naominatale.net/projects daily 0.75 2022-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462149135798-53N45CE437P74TY6N4UW/Definitionhelveticacoverlabel.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461784236940-6OYTX8RQDU121MFFO9X0/087A0368-2finalcrop.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615594611743-70773JWL3SIZDJWSX67Z/087A2922-1.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? Burial flag https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551465-BPXVIS0QB8MHBNEZ1EFA/hoespansmallweb.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? - 44 inches x 12 12 short handle hoes https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461360159433-GLDPJXBRNE8MTIY2D5CF/IMG_8742-colorSMALLWEB.jpg What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? http://www.naominatale.net/cover2 daily 0.75 2025-10-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196466635-U7M1HX3JSB9LBMZ6MCGC/image-asset.jpeg 25 lbs - 25 lbs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461822980244-3MJKCRT005UOJ0EQG6XM/casketcoversmallgood2.jpg 25 lbs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196466635-U7M1HX3JSB9LBMZ6MCGC/image-asset.jpeg 25 lbs - 25 lbs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461777766022-XXD5QAO16QPQ2RANK5WB/IMG_8742-colorSMALLWEBcover5.jpg 25 lbs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196157070-MSOV0EJREM4YZZKGS2Q3/_X1A1497.CR2smallweb.jpg 25 lbs - 25 lbs http://www.naominatale.net/one-million-bones daily 0.75 2021-03-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461764972192-YWRC4GPP28HTCDNJVIZ7/TERU_IMG_8624.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, National Mall, Washington, D.C. June, 2013 1,018,260 bones installed on the National Mall. photo credit: Teru Kuwayama https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461764972192-YWRC4GPP28HTCDNJVIZ7/TERU_IMG_8624.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, National Mall, Washington, D.C. June, 2013 1,018,260 bones installed on the National Mall. photo credit: Teru Kuwayama https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765151865-IV7RX78NE424J2FSQLLD/1013431_10201370393885039_1574339941_n+copy.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, National Mall, Washington, D.C. June, 2013 Performance of 1,018,260 bones being installed on the National Mall. photo credit: Associated Press https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765229148-N54LAW6647985024NXCC/IMG_0640W+copy.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Albuquerque, NM August 27, 2011 Installation/performance of 50,000 bones in Albuquerque, NM. photo credit: Joanne Teasdale https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615669525164-IC7H3F2CZLGCIIU9GZF1/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Congo Square, New Orleans, LA April 07, 2012 Installation/performance of 50,000 bones in New Orleans, LA. photo: Jennifer MacNeill https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765307554-PTYBU9AJL7HFU0N57IN7/Austin02+copy.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Texas State Capitol, Austin, TX April 28, 2012 Installation of bones laid on Texas Capitol grounds. These bones were made and installed by participants of One Million Bones in Texas. This installation was one of 34 public works of One Million Bones produced in 33 State Capitals on April 28, 2012. photo: Emily Keating https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615670241539-EEG3WF04T784L6FA9NHE/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, LA April 28, 2012 Installation of bones laid in Baton Rouge on Louisiana Capitol grounds. These bones were made and installed by participants of One Million Bones in Louisiana. This installation was one of 34 public works of One Million Bones produced in 33 State Capitals on April 28, 2012. photo: Dana Nguyen https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765327380-FEH7FRIX19TBII7V901E/PattyO.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Oklahoma State Capitol, Oklahoma City, OK April 28, 2012 Installation of bones laid on Oklahoma Capitol grounds. These bones were made and installed by participants of One Million Bones in Oklahoma. This installation was one of 34 public works of One Million Bones produced in 33 State Capitals on April 28, 2012. photo: Patty Ozebek https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765330744-UN4O4EKQE0LRFAGK293C/10-SAIC.jpeg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work: St. Anna's Episcopal Church, New Orleans, LA photo: Emily Gatehouse https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615669662136-V5CZYHNXNR1DKDF7PEK9/Screen+Shot+2015-06-18+at+12.53.55+PM.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones Installation at Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI. 2012 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615670259581-ONOFJ7GQDX9PX8SN7T14/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones Installation in Reno, NV. 2012 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615670078111-OL4GZ9686WU6DNPCK8VV/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Juneau, AK April 28, 2012 Installation of bones laid in Juneau, Alaska. These bones were made and installed by participants of One Million Bones in Alaska. This installation was one of 34 public works of One Million Bones produced in 33 State Capitals on April 28, 2012. photo: MK MacNaughton https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615671977207-4YL4EG6OKSMN8ZA0ROST/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones- Srebrenica, Bosnia Herzegovina Public Work, July 2015 100,00 bones installed at the Sebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center for the Commemoration of Genocide in Srebrenica. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615671987468-OOJ3Q7BUV0IF0ZZQTXZF/image.png One Million Bones - One Million Bones, Silver City, NM Public Work, April 2018 Ceramic bones remaining from the original installation laid in a meadow in Silver City, New Mexico. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766515775-VS9ETNEZXR8SE8IIQUG8/OMBimgVQR+copy.jpg One Million Bones - Untitled Photographic work created to be the concept image for One Million Bones. Artist: Naomi Natale https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615671886896-SE2VMTQH0ZD7HG854NJG/image.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public works April 28, 2012 Installation images from numerous public works of One Million Bones produced in 33 State Capitals on April 28, 2012. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765510066-UOCSF32GUZNBNHDDJD6F/nola2+copysmallweb.jpg One Million Bones - One Million Bones Public work, Congo Square, New Orleans, LA April 07, 2012 Installation/performance of 50,000 bones in New Orleans, LA. photo: Malia Johnston http://www.naominatale.net/sanding daily 0.75 2022-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196428744-OOBK9WPUULVEILB0LEWW/crutchdetail1smallweb.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196428744-OOBK9WPUULVEILB0LEWW/crutchdetail1smallweb.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461822828466-K0C8TME23UY56DF5I42L/crutchdetail1smallwebtop.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462393299762-873Q2TJANCN57OX042XX/plastercover.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461822636277-9I4X8W30KHXM3JH5B644/crutchdetail1smallwebtop.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196443430-QJYKIW8L08NNSXX33TC9/Crutchessmallweb.jpg sanding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196414244-WVK0BQE7OY9JXRXJAQEA/crutchcropsmallweb.jpg sanding http://www.naominatale.net/the-cradle-project daily 0.75 2021-03-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765805101-2M3FZ4S5QC4QH621XNXL/call+to+artistsorig2side.jpg The Cradle Project - The Cradle Project The Cradle Project (2006-2008) is a social practice work that was designed to draw attention to orphaned and vulnerable children around the world. The vision of the project was to use empty cradles as symbols made out of scrap, found or discarded materials to represent the lost potential of children whose basic needs are threatened. Over 555 cradles were created, representing a wide variety of art forms and sources- from homeless shelters, to artists in New Orleans working with refuse from Hurricane Katrina, to youth in schools and clubs, to museum exhibited artists. In June of 2008 all 555 cradles were installed in a solo exhibit in Albuquerque, New Mexico. above: Natale, 2006; photographic work and design of the call to artist card which was used to promote the project. 2006 subsequent slides: images of artist cradles made for this project. more project info here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765805101-2M3FZ4S5QC4QH621XNXL/call+to+artistsorig2side.jpg The Cradle Project - The Cradle Project The Cradle Project (2006-2008) is a social practice work that was designed to draw attention to orphaned and vulnerable children around the world. The vision of the project was to use empty cradles as symbols made out of scrap, found or discarded materials to represent the lost potential of children whose basic needs are threatened. Over 555 cradles were created, representing a wide variety of art forms and sources- from homeless shelters, to artists in New Orleans working with refuse from Hurricane Katrina, to youth in schools and clubs, to museum exhibited artists. In June of 2008 all 555 cradles were installed in a solo exhibit in Albuquerque, New Mexico. above: Natale, 2006; photographic work and design of the call to artist card which was used to promote the project. 2006 subsequent slides: images of artist cradles made for this project. more project info here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766046879-3SKIFBJXXB40M6VMM3AR/Cradle042.jpg The Cradle Project - Stop Sign Cradle Artist: Chelsea Briganti 18 x 31 x 27 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461765659345-WIZUZ2784ZZ5X4XYN60S/08SAIC.jpg The Cradle Project - untitled Artist: Anna Westfall and Megan Jacobs 18 x 28 x 18 in. oxidized metal, wire, fabric, wax photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766059291-IP9WXZV6HHLDPK22Q9LK/66_jpg.jpg The Cradle Project - Perpetual Pendulum Cradle Artist: Jerry W. Miller 28 x 14 x 36 in. steel, found flywheel photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766085860-7QCKNNQV8KIIE4HDBF7S/Cradle020.jpg The Cradle Project - La Montana Trae Barcos de Azucenas- The Mountain Brings Us Boats Full of Lillies Artist: Ana Maria Hernando 36 x 24 x 40 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766284580-86PONGHJS4KGID6C7AW6/Cradle004.jpg The Cradle Project - Broken/Home Artist: Vincent Leandro 36 x 31.5 x 25.5 in. wood Statement: This piece was made from a drop-leaf pedestal table and the backs of two chairs found outside homes where, we might imagine, they had once been used for activities such as sharing meals, writing notes and playing cards. These familiar domestic elements are symbols of our everyday lives, of normalcy, stability, family and home. They represent the people and conditions we cannot imagine losing. They represent the people and conditions millions of orphans have already lost. May this cradle serve to comfort and console, provide and protect the children who now struggle to survive, on their own, every day. photo: Addison Doty   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117409206-MYHRD61U961GS6XF4DWR/Cradle005a.jpg The Cradle Project - Real Children, Real Lives Artists: Kathy Wysocki and Wayne Hopkins 40 x 96 x 96 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766067962-2DW4PM15C7MN2MD8O0UM/Cradle005c.jpg The Cradle Project photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766344027-8XVT7XMGDO9DW7P1VD5H/Cradle023a.jpg The Cradle Project - She Cradle Artist: Shirley Klinghoffer 18 x 8 x 10 in. mixed media Statement: Approximately 72 delicate white “vulval” imprints (similar in appearance to crocus blossoms) emerge from a thin mattress and nestle inside my carefully restored antique doll cradle. These soft, silky rubber castings are like sisters banding together to support and protect each other in a show of pride and strength. When the cradle rocks, these sisters, like close-knit sisters and friends in real life, quiver “ensemble”. photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117434467-LMV218XONV9A1ESJ3G8D/Cradle023b.jpg The Cradle Project photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766308011-KQ5NSU2Y8HC9RRR8ALYU/Cradle061.jpg The Cradle Project - Nameless Cradle Artist: Ames Hawkins 96 x 72 in. vinyl, plastic grocery bags photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117185182-ZTG0U07OXNVDRPUS0LI5/Cradle068a.jpg The Cradle Project - Renew Artist: Laura Dunn 47 x 30 x 13 in. plastic grocery bags, plastic tubing and linen Statement: The cradle is an object for holding, comforting and protecting the innocent; the empty cradle is a mystery. It is this emptiness and mystery that my work attempts to question. Having recently begun a series of works woven on a simple four-harness loom, it naturally followed that my piece would be woven. The ordinary and ubiquitous plastic grocery bag is my medium of choice. I am very much interested in reuse of materials readily available and in abundance not only for the ecological implications but also as an investigation into transformation and what happens when we look at something in a new way. The utter incomprehension at the fact of the plight of these orphans and might be assuaged through art. To look at it through a different lens might create the bridge for understanding and healing. Through my chosen medium I hope to explicate my belief that there is worth to be found in even the most mundane of materials if given the structure and framework in which to grow. The form is roughly cradle-like yet it remains disconcertingly amorphous. It’s fluid, indistinct quality enhances a sense of anonymity. Additionally, the piece carries a visual weight despite its meager mass. All of these aspects come together to symbolize the nameless multitude facing an uncertain future Finally the work is suspended to signify Ascent: a levitation up out of the dust of the landfill – a rebirth and renewal. photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117211217-BI5KOADLSTT1ZVI9I5TI/Cradle068b.jpg The Cradle Project photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117534953-AQ4UXDDF5TGWMQTHUVMA/Cradle050a.jpg The Cradle Project - Down Will Come Baby Artists: The Children's School Chicago 33 x 43 x 24 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117310744-MEDJ59P02D3GBZ33OZC6/Cradle054.jpg The Cradle Project - Cradle Artist: Sarah Hewitt 23.5 x 13 x 9.5 in. raffia, seagrass, waxes, tar Statement: How we hold our loved one’s bodies as they come into and leave our lives is the focus of my explorations in Cradleboards to Coffins. Nestings, wrappings and bindings encase the spirit and body in birth and death. Mothers swaddle their newborns to provide a womb outside the womb; use casings for transportation of their young, and to create a structured environment in which the parents may choose the their child’s first views of society. In death we send our loved ones away in coffins and caskets. The funerary bindings protect the living from disease, decay and the insurmountable fear of our own death. Our customs for the newly born and recently departed are vibrantly similar though grossly separated. Through the methods of textile techniques I am exploring the forms of packaging society uses to contain our bodies and our spirits throughout our lives. Raffia, seagrass, tar and waxes compose these new works. Aromatic, and textural I aspire to transport the viewer into a quiet, meditative space. The forms are created using random weave basket techniques, intuitively winding individual strands of fiber throughout a mass of loose fiber to create a solid form. Then using random stitching I contort the vessel’s shape sewing the sides together and begin to create the feel of a human form pushing on the sides of the wrappings. As the casings develop I feel the conversation I hold with each one end and my respect for their existence blossoms. photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766326335-7WMABYGEZJVC12TVVK0I/Cradle015.jpg The Cradle Project - Light Bulb Cradle Artist: Josh Atlas 46 x 36 x 46 in. light bulbs, steel poultry netting, wire photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117266585-HILSORCBUQ71J4BZ3OB6/Cradle058.jpg The Cradle Project - Love & Hope & Faith & Love & Hope Artist: Derrick Bitsie 13.5 x 12 x 32 in. wood boards and wire paper photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766679644-BZE25I9GMFC4CKDPRA20/Cradle044a.jpg The Cradle Project - Katrina Cradled Artists: Kathy Hughes and Karen Abboud 36 x 19 x 31 in. refuse from Hurricane Katrina flooded houses Statement: As artists we have always found beauty in decay and detritus. Katrina provided us with resources and an opportunity for reflection on the theme of destruction and renewal. Using discarded trash to construct the cradle, we were able to work through the emotions that were so prevalent in our community, creating a piece as metaphor for healing and rebirth. We hope that this resonates with the same spirit of hope for the African Aids orphans, symbolized by the heart-shaped, swaddled river stone that lays inside the cradle. photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766341193-KXYX1C2P4HG7VP3OHICQ/Cradle022a.jpg The Cradle Project - Message in a Bottle Artist: Audrey Bell 20 x 20 x 27 in. plastic bottles photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117289256-ZJDIYTBG6CKQ73RXYD9V/Cradle045.jpg The Cradle Project - Oil Can Cradle Artist: Anthony Guntren 16 x 20 x 24 in. car parts, oil can photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766134300-LB3EPW6ZASK32RLFYA2O/Cradle033a.jpg The Cradle Project - Holding Them Artist: Joann E. Schilling 24 x 18 x 24 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766348751-JQTPETUWLBDFKELYRK7Y/Cradle029.jpg The Cradle Project - Wayside Deluxe Artist: Alfons Poblocki 12 x 31 x 16 in. bicycle rim, cedar photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117340171-ZCDN901Y8VXMLVWLIZXP/Cradle039.jpg The Cradle Project - Cradle Artist: Autumn Riddle 15 x 15 x 32 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766388956-KOD090C4PWF4I3Z1BDEE/Cradle007.jpg The Cradle Project - Womb Nest Artist: Melanie Yanke 32 x 32 x 60 in. willow sapplings, sheeting photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766778712-9Z1M79AKPSIMMXM7RCSS/Cradle021.jpg The Cradle Project - Cradle Artist: Steve Bromberg 48 x 32 x 18 in. steel photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766729549-FTET2DSTB5WUGYUSS3L4/Cradle026a.jpg The Cradle Project - Fragments Artist: K. M. White 15 x 22 x 15 in. bone, mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766399221-0NIJS64CEQ0K331F9GSE/Cradle002.jpg The Cradle Project - Fault Line Artist: Margaret H. Fitzgerald 29 x 15 x 119 in. cedar, rebar photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462117491264-PKZVBQZ4TKQKQ76TMCA5/Cradle067.jpg The Cradle Project - Womb Illusion Artist: P.D Rearick 70 x 40 x 24 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766394009-8OKNG2ZMOP4JBC43CXWS/Cradle006a.jpg The Cradle Project - For the Conquered Children Artists: Lindy Hirst, Debra Montoya, Vanessa Alvarado 39 x 30 x 58 in. mixed media Statement: Teaching is learning. I work collaboratively to teach and at the same time learn from my students. This cradle is a collaborative project by two students and myself: Vanessa Alvarado and Debra Montoya. The three of us contributed both conceptual and material ideas. Vanessa, for example, came up with the idea to paint the interior puzzle pieces blood red for HIV/AIDS. On one intense glue day Vanessa said, “Hey, this piece feels like an altar.” The Catholic Guardian Angel, familiar from childhood to both Deb and Vanessa, fit right in above the altar that all three of us instantly recognized developing inside the foot of the cradle. At the headboard is the face of the Virgen de Guadalupe who replaces the missing stork’s head and who is predominate in Debra’s work. We three have adopted her as the guiding symbol of this piece: the comforter and protector of the poor and conquered children. photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766709629-DMZZVX7IQGO37DW45D7T/Cradle051.jpg The Cradle Project - Cradle Recipe -Add Children and Rock Vigorously Artist: Michael Cavallini 20 x 20 20 in. used clothing photo: Addison Doty https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461766365221-OYUIR0OZQMGBFFBGQ3NJ/Cradle059.jpg The Cradle Project - San Baboose Artist: Elke Edith Duerr 18 x 18 x 32 in. mixed media photo: Addison Doty http://www.naominatale.net/new-gallery daily 0.75 2022-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461822828466-K0C8TME23UY56DF5I42L/crutchdetail1smallwebtop.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461822828466-K0C8TME23UY56DF5I42L/crutchdetail1smallwebtop.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462393299762-873Q2TJANCN57OX042XX/plastercover.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551122-Q76KR1U6PTK1Q8ER8LPP/crutchcropsmallweb.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196443430-QJYKIW8L08NNSXX33TC9/Crutchessmallweb.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461362017720-3WIW7XUBQV6BO16K0PY7/Crutchessmallweb.jpg New Gallery http://www.naominatale.net/new-gallery-1 daily 0.75 2016-05-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462198441942-ONK0O6780FOYXA4L735L/diggingslide.jpg New Gallery For years I collected bones. And they were heavy. And though I knew the physical place we would carry them to, I had never considered what I would do with all that weight. It was during this time that I began to dream of digging. Of carving a place in the earth I could look at and imagine laying them in. And it was in these dreams that I began to ask myself this question, does anything go away? Three years later I break ground and begin a digging practice to consider this question. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462198441942-ONK0O6780FOYXA4L735L/diggingslide.jpg New Gallery For years I collected bones. And they were heavy. And though I knew the physical place we would carry them to, I had never considered what I would do with all that weight. It was during this time that I began to dream of digging. Of carving a place in the earth I could look at and imagine laying them in. And it was in these dreams that I began to ask myself this question, does anything go away? Three years later I break ground and begin a digging practice to consider this question. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196151291-6L91IOW6N98WQSI9SOVO/_X1A0505web.jpg New Gallery I study the meaning of words, and begin to write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I am searching for the right words to ask this question, but they are not there. words have always failed me.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196091914-I1BWQ7GVJIK5WSXTT2UO/_X1A0431smallweb.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196614972-OPQVOKET4LL838T3E8PR/IMG_8742-colorweb8.jpg New Gallery I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop. And I inquire of its story. It is sad. and it is real. But I’ve never seen such an honest object and I’m drawn to it, despite its sadness, despite its weight. And I wonder… because this is an object that was specifically made to put something away… https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196466635-U7M1HX3JSB9LBMZ6MCGC/casket2smallwebcolor.jpg New Gallery I think. I think more, and am so unsettled that the discomfort calls me. I decide that I will buy it, and I will live with it. Because I believe I can learn something from it. And I know that when the time comes that I cannot live with it anymore I will bury it. This makes sense. So I live with it and pay attention and from day to day it changes its meaning to me. I decide I need to weigh it because that seems the only measurement that I can hold onto when everything else about it seems so impossible to capture. The casket weighs 25lbs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196157070-MSOV0EJREM4YZZKGS2Q3/_X1A1497.CR2smallweb.jpg New Gallery I take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew it into a canvas bag. I set both of these in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil, it is a void. I wonder, how does one traverse that space? What would that take? How might one reconsider the means by which they measure the significance of anything for themselves? I understand that this is my road. I continue to dig and study the meaning of words. I realize there is a more important question and leave the former to ask myself this: What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196107079-20ZLEZ7XQ0HZX739E0OQ/_X1A0498web.jpg New Gallery I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such an experience demands. I hang the dress in a room against and with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196341716-81XHLIOU5Q7X7HIUT3AI/definitionlongwebsmall9cover.jpg New Gallery In my study of words and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition to a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know. I share this with a few people. but they don’t seem to understand. Yet I believe this space, _______________: and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether or not we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue on this road. I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken. In September, I travel to Florida and I dig there. Where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. This road is always teaching me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196128629-Q1ZIQQ2WFF2WF3LCINHR/incubatorsmallweb.jpg New Gallery I am taught to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, but which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming. After the building of the coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After the living with her. After the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that. But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day- through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196414244-WVK0BQE7OY9JXRXJAQEA/crutchcropsmallweb.jpg New Gallery I then come to this vision that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. From this, I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like significant work, work that I must also be doing every day. As a way to get closer. As a way to point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but which my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196428744-OOBK9WPUULVEILB0LEWW/crutchdetail1smallweb.jpg New Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196443430-QJYKIW8L08NNSXX33TC9/Crutchessmallweb.jpg New Gallery And the sanding is tedious, as it should be. it strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body. And I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196376871-3KG04M3DMYQTDWGZZJA1/hoespansmallweb.jpg New Gallery After years of looking for just one, I find a collection of short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in american fields by migrant farmworkers, where life has been hard and unfair. Eventually they were banned in parts of this country for their backbreaking design but only after a long fight. So I make a box to put these hoes and their stories in and dig a space in the ground that will hold this box. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196358740-YM46KURRES2L6GJRIM17/hoecloseupswebsmall2.jpg New Gallery I then take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle off till it is the same size as the one from the collection. But this one I will work myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to build a relationship to this object. Because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462198246654-Y2UP4X9KTEOX13DKYFFQ/blankslide-final.jpg New Gallery I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question: “If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?” I hold onto this and begin another journey but that I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void… I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I also know there will always be more questions. I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined, in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway. But I struggle, the question nags at me and I need more. Because I’m is so unsure and because I know this question is important and nothing I’ve done has explained it. And though all of these relationships are about engaging in a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world I begin to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer or refine my question to another person while carrying the political gravity the question deserves. Though I’m not ready to leave them. I am committed to them and to the idea I’m carrying in my mind of how they might change or inform me in some way. But this understanding does shift my focus from the question itself to why the question is important and that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning. Today this where I find myself. At the beginning. Open. completely open… Trying to constantly remind myself that there is a space between everything. And if you consider the space between a question and an answer, how anyone gets from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. Perhaps each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us- if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. The cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. I am part of an invisible system, created far before I was born, but inherited and live in the legacy and privilege of. And so I sand and I dig, to remind myself that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system that was built and shaped in an ideology of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land. Which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payment I send in but in the time I spent earning it. For me this is what it means to be present in my relationship to and within this world, as a white american woman. This past month I’ve been thinking what does ground-zero look like for me in this investigation. Why does this question matter? All this time that I’ve been considering this question I’ve focused on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything- all the legacies of trauma, to people, to species and to the earth, but not knowing how to connect that to myself and to each of us individually. How does one connect to the truth or whole of the past when it is completely inaccessible as it’s so huge and unrecorded in its entirety. And so I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? what if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with them all. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality? This I believe is my ground-zero and the beginning. http://www.naominatale.net/new-gallery-3 daily 0.75 2022-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593541837-WGDU5U0ZKL9XLBEGOQSB/20180629_1471.jpg process works - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? 2015-2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593541837-WGDU5U0ZKL9XLBEGOQSB/20180629_1471.jpg process works - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? 2015-2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196614972-OPQVOKET4LL838T3E8PR/IMG_8742-colorweb8.jpg process works - 25 lbs, 2015-2021 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593545895-JAE616F4BDK9XEOFDY1G/087A1280smallweb.jpg process works - Digging, 2015-ongoing Digging, 2015-ongoing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551122-Q76KR1U6PTK1Q8ER8LPP/crutchcropsmallweb.jpg process works - Sanding down, 2016 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615594611743-70773JWL3SIZDJWSX67Z/087A2922-1.jpg process works - Burial flag, 2016 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196376871-3KG04M3DMYQTDWGZZJA1/hoespansmallweb.jpg process works - 44 inches x 12, 2015 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461784236940-6OYTX8RQDU121MFFO9X0/087A0368-2finalcrop.jpg process works - Incubator, 2015 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462196428744-OOBK9WPUULVEILB0LEWW/crutchdetail1smallweb.jpg process works http://www.naominatale.net/ship-for-dreams daily 0.75 2023-10-24 http://www.naominatale.net/new-cover-page-1 daily 0.75 2024-10-16 http://www.naominatale.net/untitled-inquiry daily 0.75 2016-04-22 http://www.naominatale.net/void-cont-1 daily 0.75 2022-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462127451379-GRJ2HEITJIQX8L94MP5J/087A1280smallweb.jpg Void cont. - self portrait: 35 56 09 N, 107 29 11 W 03/25/2016 116 lbs displaced earth https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1461851602894-SYMCOG3WSA0ADR4IC3LR/087A1331smallweb.jpg Void cont. - self portrait: 35 56 09 N, 107 29 11 W 03/25/2016 116 lbs displaced earth (re-placed) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462393517101-CXZJN5GZSYG4P6ELGOGF/image-asset.png Void cont. http://www.naominatale.net/pagecv daily 0.75 2022-11-02 http://www.naominatale.net/about daily 0.75 2016-05-01 http://www.naominatale.net/works-1 daily 0.75 2022-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1734480501653-VG2GNS1LAR4PVSOJD0DJ/Screenshot+2024-10-29+at+11.11.38+AM.png Works - Of Grief & Dreams https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615590964901-E2U076ZPB4OXB7MXTP45/Mama-Memoir_Worksample1.jpg Works - One Million Bones, 2008-2013 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615590960655-QXCGQY7EEPBM5L21CY58/IMG-20170911-WA0002.jpg Works - En la Luz, 2015-2017 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615590961157-79A07ZSBQZYKCZQ89O7V/20180629_1436.jpg Works - Remanere, 2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615596002896-PZS1SAUHVG42I81L37O2/087A0094-e1539366455596.jpg Works - Lines Across Time, 2017-ongoing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615591876263-FB7LO5GPX3M74GX6T4N3/Cradle020.jpg Works - The Cradle Project, 2006-2008 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593541837-WGDU5U0ZKL9XLBEGOQSB/20180629_1471.jpg Works - What does it mean to live with everything that doesn't go away? 2015-2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593545895-JAE616F4BDK9XEOFDY1G/087A1280smallweb.jpg Works - Digging, 2015-ongoing https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551122-Q76KR1U6PTK1Q8ER8LPP/crutchcropsmallweb.jpg Works - Sanding down, 2016 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615594611743-70773JWL3SIZDJWSX67Z/087A2922-1.jpg Works - Burial Flag, 2016 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593551465-BPXVIS0QB8MHBNEZ1EFA/hoespansmallweb.jpg Works - 44 inches x 12, 2015; 12 short handle hoes https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1462204754665-XNOQQFCZ5H2P2OLLF6HT/087A0368-2final+copy.jpg Works - Incubator, 2015 http://www.naominatale.net/home daily 1.0 2022-11-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615675000167-B3UHIHZC92CV9ITLY204/Mama-Memoir_Worksample1.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615675023312-AEP434UN88YU7B6BX6E1/IMG-20170911-WA0002.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615591876263-FB7LO5GPX3M74GX6T4N3/Cradle020.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1667410637491-1CJYSHMWFDHX9JY8IOLZ/sebastianhands.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615593545895-JAE616F4BDK9XEOFDY1G/087A1280smallweb.jpg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1615675037529-UPNVYEIWWUE0E7XKEF0A/087A0094-e1539366455596.jpg Home http://www.naominatale.net/request daily 0.75 2022-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1667232287851-4KJ6BVQHEWC3WEXIW50I/IMG_2456.jpg Request 5/3/2019, the day sebas was born http://www.naominatale.net/of-grief-and-dreams daily 0.75 2024-11-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1667232287851-4KJ6BVQHEWC3WEXIW50I/IMG_2456.jpg Of Grief and Dreams - Make it stand out The day Sebas was born, mama holding the world in her arms. 5/3/2019 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/a9852add-3770-49ae-8bc1-7c001bfc9194/tempImageY2oPax.jpg Of Grief and Dreams - Make it stand out Sebastián holding Sarah’s offering http://www.naominatale.net/wild-geese daily 0.75 2024-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/1667232287851-4KJ6BVQHEWC3WEXIW50I/IMG_2456.jpg Wild Geese - Make it stand out The day Sebas was born, mama holding the world in her arms. 5/3/2019 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571a8ae3356fb0bb34587caf/a9852add-3770-49ae-8bc1-7c001bfc9194/tempImageY2oPax.jpg Wild Geese - Make it stand out Sebastián holding Sarah’s offering http://www.naominatale.net/new-page-1 daily 0.75 2024-10-16