Come Experience Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk
We are honored to hold space in our Apothecary this month for SWATHE, a body of work by Ellen Cline.
SWATHE is both a verb and a noun.
As a noun, it can be a long strip of cloth.
A row of cut grain left by a scythe or a clearing machine.
A space devastated as if by a scythe.
Swathe, the verb, is often used to refer to swaddling a baby in blankets, but it can also refer to using bandages to bind and protect a wound.
Somehow one word holds both meanings. One sound indicates both a place left desolate, and that gesture of swaddling, of binding a wound.
This work comes from my position as a person raised to fear, mistrust, and disconnect from my queer body as a site of total depravity and contamination. The three hairshirts call out dirty, broken, dangerous – cilices worn close to the skin as a means to mortify the flesh. My road out of that world continues to wind; some of my first steps began with a studio practice to dance every day for 100 days. As I slowly settled into my body, I started to know: I was queer, I was not okay but I was going to be, and the years I had spent devoted to a God served with a mixture of love and terror were over. The swathe of cleared and open ground that spread out before me held great loss and great promise.
As the years go on I am relearning how to be: not suffering, set apart, and holy, but just a human-sized human amid the complexity and nuance of life. Like a child disoriented by the death of an abusive parent, I find myself at the same time set free and full of grief.
That mixture of grief and liberation was with me in the studio making these pieces. I leaned into ways of working that felt soft on my body, materials compelling to touch, ways of working that honored my inherited body-memory skills from being raised to be a wife and a mother– skills like sewing and weaving, applying these gestures to materials that might less often receive that kind of gentle, care-giving touch. I collected letharia vulpina lichen: a plant that can be used both as a poison taken internally, and also as poultice for wound care. Charcoal is a discard, left behind by burning, and only in that state can we take it to stop severe poisoning. I used bedsheets and bike tubes and bandaids and my childhood Bible. I collected the blood my trans body releases, menstrual blood that according to the Bible made me unclean and cut off from approaching God. In the studio that cast-off, pain heavy fluid becomes pigment, material for making. For paying attention, which in the words of Simone Weil, is the same thing as prayer.
My engagement with material in these pieces– wax, cloth, blood, charcoal, lichen, latex, bandage– brings together the binaries of soft and sharp, flexible and rigid, natural and unnatural, sacred and profane, harm and healing.
I’m curious about how bodily, tactile ways of working with material can shape and change our internal landscapes. In times of ambiguous loss, how do we retrieve, honor, work with what remains? Wrapping, sewing, knitting, and weaving are care-giving gestures that ravel forward a map in the dark.
Details
Our Apothecary community gathering and gallery space will be open for viewing from 5:00-8:00pm. All are welcome. No cost to attend or registration required.
Ellen Cline
Ellen (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and psychotherapist. Their art and therapy practices both invite paying close attention to and weaving connections among the viscera of our interior lives. In the studio, Ellen uses natural, salvaged, or repurposed materials and intuitive, meditative gestures to create pieces that function as remnants of the meaning-making process.
Learn more about Ellen here.