Evaporation story

My enquiry into maternal rhythms of grief began to emerge while I was working in an artist residency. This impulse to carry my dirty paint water in a dish into the sun came over me, interrupted the flow of my studio work and daily routines. It arrived through the sprinklers that ticked me awake as the sun came up, the dripping facet and the cloudless midnight blue sky of the desert. During this extreme drought, and sudden loss of my sister by suicide my unsteady body escaped the milieu. This divergence resulted in many encounters while finding resonance with a mixture of evaporating memories. A year later, I became a mother, and the rhythms of parenting become entwined with evaporation, with the childhood memories shared with my sister. She showed me how to make my own paths and fearlessly claim my freedom to explore the open world. When I am moved to carry evaporation, the head chatter and survivor’s guilt softens. I felt presence come and go in unexpected ways and am surprised by the landscapes carved out before me.

This post-qualitative and arts research study enquires how trustworthy knowledge can be produced from an unstable subject position. To address this question, I employ a durational approach that disorders linear and productive time frames, and regulatory and rationalizing obligations often put upon mothers and caregivers. I also explore interdependent writing spaces that stretch out time so that I can connect with my sensory powers. Evaporation and dyeing are the affective mediums that move me to ceremony, to engage in worldmaking. Further, my practices connect with crip time and care, an area of focus in disability studies literatures that understand that language, movement and time are entangled. It differentiates from demi-rhetorics (Yergeau, 2018) that turn the vocalizations and artworks of disabled people back on them as forms of violence. My work labors materially to broadens the narrowing definition of mother, and to finds ways to move (Price, 2011) across multiple disabled embodiments.