This performance installation featured over three hundred handmade ceramic plates shaped to resemble notebook pages, which were installed in two grids on either side of a freestanding, perpetually running sink. Across the first grid, each plate was inscribed with handwritten text featuring some fragment of a narrative dealing with loss, anxiety, fear, shame, or some other emotional burden. These were a mix of my personal writing and a number of other writings contributed anonymously by members of the local community over the course of several preliminary events. Displayed together, the variety of handwritings, writing styles, and even the occasional variance of language created an interesting effect: the abundance of voices transformed each individual incident of raw vulnerability into a collective act of openness.

For the duration of the exhibit, I performed the piece by washing the inscribed plates clean for an hour each day that the gallery was open. As I performed, the second grid filled with these washed ceramic pages. Visitors were encouraged to take these from the wall and write their contributions on them at an adjacent table, before replacing them in the inscribed grid. This allowed the piece to inhabit the gallery as a living project, and to signal the open cycle of healing and loss.

 , is repair  originated very simply as a narrative piece, telling the story of a year in mourning after the death of my father, when I found myself compulsively doing dishes. This mundane, emotionally and intellectually silent gesture enabled me to perform a small act of repair: returning a messy, dysfunctional object to a state of wholeness, resolution, and readiness. Washing became a private, insular act of healing by metaphor when the actual dysfunction of grief seemed insurmountable. Over the course of the year, however, I discovered that self-repair has the potential to be expansive, and this compulsive, private act created space for healing beyond my own.

This piece was exhibited and performed at the Gallery of Visual Arts at the University of Montana in 2016 and again at the UC Gallery in Missoula in 2017.

Photos by Sarah Moore

Press: Missoulian, Montana Kaimin