I have made these drawings of voids. They are round shapes that drape and obscure. They are often very dark and opaque, only occasionally do they have transparency. I started making them in the middle of a pandemic, because I had some watercolor crayons lying around at work, and these old furniture catalogs that were a nice size and heft. The paper had tooth and the color sunk in comfortably.
I say: I made these about the strange sense of absence and presence that is happening right now. Negotiating the physical distance of loved ones that are never-the-less disembodied presences on screens. Navigating the encroaching responsibility to be present online, a kind of big-brother presence that permeates my space. Zoom, a demon in the corner, crouching. I live at my job, that space engulfs me and obliterates me. The void is me turning inside out. I am disappearing.
A few nights ago I am talking with other women about the concept of taking up space. Ever since I first heard this concept I have contemplated why I always take the smaller of two choices. I think I am being generous or humble. But I have come to realize that it is something closer to shame.
To void something is to completely empty it. I always think of the phrase: “void your bladder” – something clinical that they probably say at the doctor’s office. Emptiness, loss, not valid, useless, lacking, discharge, drain away. It sounds dark, but I would argue it is also promise: a void always has potential.
I dated someone for a long time that took up a great deal of space. I think he knows that, so I won’t feel bad saying so. In retrospect it was an odd match and I often wonder why we were together. My most recent conclusion is that I had hoped that his energy would clear space for me too. Maybe be a kind of exoskeleton I could step into and move through the world. The fire that he emanated clearing a path I might also walk.
That’s not how it turned out. I turned in.
I had a job once, that I created. It was the exoskeleton I needed to survive. I left it unaware that it was my house, and that once it was gone I would feel like jelly. I am not a hermit crab after all and couldn’t adapt to the borrowed shells I found. But it wasn’t ego-death. You might be surprised. It was something more physical. When I put two and two together I began to understand what it meant, to take up space.
I am alone in a borrowed shell and I am making these voids on borrowed paper with borrowed crayons. In their use I claim them and I take up some kind of space by emptying myself into it. I am perhaps voiding my psyche, I don’t know that much, but maybe. But with every discharge of energy I am making something, a thing I haven’t done for years.
I went to art school and took the BFA and the MFA. I wanted to be an artist, but I think the lesson I never learned is artists take up space. It was always right away: make this, make that. A directive I guess, that I obeyed, and when the directives were gone I didn’t know what to do. I went looking for someone else to serve, because I had no concept of serving myself. That is taking up space: to feed yourself healthy spoonfuls.
I stepped into the exoskeleton of service, as a guarantee of worth. Don’t get me wrong, that work was not meaningless to me – I am just now examining the fact that I am more comfortable ceding space to everyone and everything else. I will let the you fill me up and overtake me, but what I don’t know about myself is: why do I have so much shame around the me inside of me? I go looking for evidence of her in pictures, often I see a person I don’t recognize. That picture is not of me.
I had a wonderful thing happen to me this winter, a friend I respect wanted to show their work with my voids. I was honored, but also the primary emotion that welled up was shame. It is no doubt a strange kind of symbolic that the work is the making of a void – a kind of obliteration – which is, in my mind, the root feeling to shame. A desire to disappear. Now that desire is public and grappling with that outing feels a bit like cautiously, tentatively stepping into a room of monsters that turns out to just be people in monster suits. But what, what if they are monsters in monster suits, my gut says, yanking me back inside?
The moral transgression of taking up space is embedded somewhere in my psyche. I know why and where and how, but yet I can’t quite repair the trigger point that says some forms of visibility are disgusting and worthy of contempt. The location and reproduction of a separate self are repugnant in the eyes of the narcissistic parent who has you tethered to them as one of their limbs. While I may have sawed myself free, I was both the branch and sitting on it. How does a disembodied branch become a tree?
Perhaps the process of emptying. Voiding the void into the void and then staring at it. Letting it reflect back all the other voids in its midst. Again again again repeat. I am taking up this space at the very least so I can begin to see myself for myself. Not for how the other describes, and thus draws me.