Astrid Kaemmerling + Becca J.R. Lachman HOME – SICK
O
ur book-length collaboration HOME – SICK has been fueled by mailing and emailing stanzas, photographs, and mixed-media collages between SE Ohio and the Bay Area since 2015.
Through this creative cross-pollination and long-distance friendship, our work more fully enters our experiences related to body as home and space as story, even when that home is unsafe, unfinished, or carries weighty mysteries “too close to home” into our evolving adult lives and sense of selves. For us, some of these mysteries include unexplained infertility and personal trauma. With lyric poetry, collected process material, and mixed media on paper, we aim to trace the outlines and shapes of stories related to our home building. Whether an actual house going through years of renovation, or a body and spirit doing the same, our work leans into and against the domestic, the feminine, and feminist. It depends on the power of female friendship to coax/demand/sing a story to the surface, and along with it, a life imagined or hoped-for into clearer view. A general audience still wants an ending we can literally and figuratively live with: a healthy pregnancy, a happy family, a welcoming home, even a strong female artist who’s still “in her place.” We navigate alternative creation myths we have needed to tell in order to move into the rooms waiting for us, made for us, and made by us.
10
Fa l l 2 0 1 8
