Personal Statement, “Overflown and Emptied,” 2017

 

Eleven years ago, I had every intention of writing a statement for “Overflown and Emptied.”  Feeling that it wouldn’t be sufficient, or that I hadn’t had the time to process my experience, I decided to wait.  It’s hard to believe that more than a decade and so much of life has passed since then, and there are still insufficient words.  I’ll make an attempt.

 

Looking at this work again, I realize how coming home at this point was so profound.  I understand that there is no way that anyone who didn’t live here for an extended period of time could fathom what the destruction of Katrina meant.  (I think pointedly of my former partner, who was to be my husband.)

 

One night, in that 2005 December, I stood on the porch of the house I had lived in for a couple years, the first location I had all to my own, for which I paid $425 a month. I trespassed into the property – but there was no more lock on the door. Its floor, where I had danced with abandon in a ballet costume on Halloween, was entirely warped. The refrigerator slanted next to the kitchen counter, where on my birthday my sister in law Elizabeth made me a delicious quail.  Next to that room, we had watched – on VHS because that’s how things worked then – a National Geographic special about crazy ass animals. It was so fucking hot – the gas stove had no qualms about double-acting as a heater. I’m a July kid.

 

 Then I had a gerbil as a pet, who was named NIMH after the movie The Secret of NIMH. She would roll around in one of those hamster balls all over the place.  I didn’t get my damage deposit back – not because of harboring a rodent – but because I used wood filler to plug all the holes I had made in an at-home art show meant to help build funds to move to Montana. The watermarks were at about eight feet.  Had I lived there I would have drowned.

 

I took photos of my place, grateful no one had moved in. I made this work in part based on those images.  I also took my camera around the neighborhood in which I grew up, where I walked on my first day back, finding Duane amidst ruins of homes, where he was repairing.

 

At one point during this trip, my near-spouse woke me up in the middle of the night, drunk, telling me again what a cold and distant person I was, despite the fact that I was sick from mold and working to make money to support us. It was like a metaphor.  Don’t stay right now.  Or, Kathy, you love too willingly.  This will also disappear.

 

This work was about repairing me.  I intended to make one hundred drawings, but only made it halfway.  As my heart broke for my home, and as it would shatter again, I thought that by using imagery from what I knew and imagery from the place I was growing to know that I could make some kind of amends for myself. 

 

I live here now, in an apartment near the lake, with my cat who is consistently under the bed.  I came back because I don’t want to lose my home again.  I want to make change here.  But, as my dad says, hope is not a plan.  Our best bet, living in this carnivalesque dream, seems to be to just keep on – day by day.  Whatever this particular bubble in the world brings, roll with it without bursting.  And, have a plan.  Mine is to – I don’t know, survive then grow.