“Living and Breathing”
There is a practice in the scuba diving world known as “buddy breathing,” in which a person who no longer has access to his or her own oxygen supply shares the oxygen supply of a fellow diver.
Buddy breathing is only required when something has gone terribly wrong.
I think it’s fair to say, in these tumultuous times, that something has gone terribly wrong.
Whether it’s the sort of racial tragedies and injustices encapsulated by the cry, “I can’t breathe.” Or the pace of the modern world and consumerist society that keeps us feeling like we can’t catch our breath. Or the claustrophobia of being stuck in our houses, trying to lead our lives under conditions we’ve never faced before. Or the fight for clean air, which happens both politically and in our very bodies, as the alveoli in our lungs have to eat through more and more debris in order to do their jobs. Or the hospital wards full of people fighting against the lung damage wrought by Covid. Or whether it’s simply the awareness of the space between ourselves and those around us, experienced in terms of both physical distancing and an anxiety-producing, seemingly unbridgeable socio-political divide.
In all these cases, our ability to breath through it all is at the very center of the discussion.
My playfully interpretive sculpture duo, entitled ‘Living and Breathing,’ is constructed of bulbous shapes dripping with an almost biological-looking green resin. It is pierced with holes from which an alarming, caution-colored florescent orange is being emitted, or, perhaps, is oozing, or, perhaps, is glowing with vision.
And from deep within, there is breath.
Is the piece symbolic of pulmonary processes? Or is it a metaphorical creature? Either way, for this creation, breathing is a shared experience--a rather tense, yet meditative, duet shared between the two sculptures. And as the more dominant piece falls in and out of rhythm with the smaller, presumably more vulnerable one, the viewer is left wondering: What if one or the other falls out of breath altogether?
By engendering these questions, and by sharing the space of breath with its audience, it is also an experience shared with you. I hope you are feeling drawn in by that breath—drawn in for a closer encounter. What will you find? What kind of creature is this? What kind of creature are you?