Release

2021, 2 x 3 feet, acrylic, fiber, and duct tape

Release

Artist statement written for Intersect Arts Center’s Here//Now 2021 Exhibition

January 2021

In early December 2020, I had an anxiety attack that lasted about 10 hours. It started out like a dark storm, the kind that you don’t see coming, but is immediately very much all around you. My chest and shoulders became extremely tense. My thoughts began to whirl quickly all around in my head and I couldn’t grasp a single one. I was angry and confused and unable to construct my thoughts into words.

By that night, when I lay down and closed my eyes, I felt my bed slowly spinning under me. It was as if the swirling thoughts had spun around my brain for so long, I was now actually dizzy. My husband tried to understand what was happening to me, but I still couldn’t grasp any sense from my thoughts.

Through the tempest in my head, I was able to harness these two questions for my husband; “Can a person walk inside the eye of a tornado?” and “how does a tornado end?” He answered, “a person probably can’t actually walk inside a tornado because it’s moving too quickly” and “when a tornado ends, it just disappears into the sky.”

One might even say it vanishes into thin air.

I held on tight to his answers as the storm raged all around me. I took them and crafted them into a result that I was not expecting, using a tool I had used during the painful childbirth of my two daughters. Visualization is a technique used to help a person relax by using imagination.

I closed my eyes and believed that a tornado could travel across the land slowly enough for a person to walk calmly inside of it. Then I imagined myself as that person. Now that I was inside the tornado, my thoughts joined it like they were grateful to be home. The tornado and I walked across a flat landscape, slowly, until it finally lifted off the land and disappeared into the sky in a gradient of whirling thoughts, grazing my shoulders as it rose, like a reversing hourglass.

And I was completely at peace.

My chest and shoulder pain was immediately gone, the bed was no longer spinning, and I was able to talk to my husband.

My thoughts had vanished with the tornado into thin air.