Mending is an Act of care

A present exploration into what ‘care’ actually looks like and feels like: care as an action word. Care is painful and tedious. Care is generative. Care is creative. How can we tend the landscapes we love, once our bodies and humanhood recognize the complicity in its destruction? How can we use our hands and hours to mend these landscapes back together, stitch by careful stitch?

TedXSaltLakeCity talk about the Mending Project below.

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Gosh though, (golly even), over the years of this project I have wondered what in the good green fuck I am doing: spending so much time painting landscapes I adore, destroying them, and mending them to the point that it’s hard to even see from far away. Hours and hours to end up back at a very similar place to where I started. Why?

The answer to why happened at the beginning, but has also changed and evolved so much. The why that I started with was simple - wanting to feel a feeling. I was curious about my own emotional endurance to stay - to be with the places I love and think about the hardest parts that I feel most powerless in changing. I am so often mad at chevron or the copper mine or whomever, and yet I put gasoline in my car. I use technology. I participate in capitalism. I am a few steps removed. What does it actually FEEL like to be no-steps removed? To physically punch something that I love, or am proud of?

Turns out, feels bad. Also, feels good. Also, is fun. Also, breaks my squishy little human heart.

This project continued to teach me, through the hours of mending. More reasons why. Here are some of the things I have learned:

• Mending does not mean going backwards, that isn’t how time works you silly goose. The canvas will never not be punched, from here forward.

• Destroying things is easy, and fun, and so very quick. Mending is not as fun, and takes forever. Mending hurts.

• Mending is another way that love looks like. Mending is an act of care.

• CARE is an ACTION word. When we say we ‘care’ about something, what does that look like in physical space?

• Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. This inevitability requires honoring.

• It is a practice to continue to care in the face of all the things that scare me and break my heart. To stubbornly care despite (or in spite) of everything we are up against.

• The thing that always, forever, amen, that must come first is feeling.

Though it’s hard to tell from faraway once these canvases are mended, they are still full of holes and scars that become absolute constellations when held up to the sun. The invisible made visible, again - the torn edges and the needle-holes. The painting remembers everything that came before. Every landscape remembers what came before.

EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS, BECAUSE OF EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE.

What magic and resilience, there. What comfort.