Our guest poster today is Tiffany, who used to write a great blog, jail diet, one of my favorite blog titles ever, but stopped.
Tif lives in Chicago. She is an MFA candidate in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an arts educator who integrates the practice of non-violence with the Shanti Foundation for Peace. Currently she’s in New York City for the month of August to costume “Lady,” a show off-Broadway in the West Village. She can also be found here.
What does it mean to be lost, if it’s always somewhere?
I washed my favorite pair of black knee socks. While folding the laundry, I had only one of the two. After re-tracing my steps, it was nowhere to be found. Where did it go? Into the mystical sock vacuum where all missing socks go! For over a year I kept it in this one section of my sock drawer: The Sock Lost & Found. And after a year, I finally threw it away in the garbage. Within days after throwing it out, I found the other black knee sock. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was, after all, “right here” all the time. But, my year’s worth of holding on to the sock mattered nothing now as now this poor sock, the once missing sock, is now, again, one of a kind– forever. I figured that throwing this newly found sock away in the garbage would somehow put them, well, in the same place—where they can be together (at least spiritually).
I taught a physical theater workshop for high school students at Northwestern University with my husband about a month ago. At the end of it, I saw one of the girls staring at the floor, navigating it closely with her eyes. She had lost one of her earrings during the final showings and was seeing if she could find it – remembering where she heard it drop near the radiators. I jumped in to help her, but after ten minutes we all gave up. “No big deal,” she said, “I made it myself. I could probably make another one.” I replied to her, “Well, good thing it wasn’t grandma’s heirloom!”
When we got home I noticed that the book I had ordered a month earlier on Amazon had finally come in the mail. It’s a remake of a Japanese craft book about repurposing old socks and gloves to make into children’s toys and quirky eco-gifts. Thumbing through the designs, I realized that somehow the lost earring and the lost or missing glove or sock had come together in the same day, nearly an hour apart from one another.
If something of a pair has been lost, it must be out there somewhere—it doesn’t just disappear. But, where does that item go? What does it mean that it has disappeared to us? And what is the person supposed to do now with only one of something that was once a pair? Why do we tend to hold on to that one object in hope of eventually, someday, finding the missing half of the pair?
It’s socially correct to wear matching earrings, gloves, socks, cufflinks, etc. because wearing the objects in pairs on the body slightly mimics the body. The symmetry of the objects in two mimics the duality of the body; symmetry in the body is longed for as our beauty (supposedly) lies in symmetry.
Sometimes these objects that we lose are precious, and sometimes these objects are quite meaningless. However, I think it’s our human nature to go on a quest to find the other object, to give it purpose, to lessen the bourdon of having to replace the object, and to seek the joy when we (or someone else) finds it. And, oddly, no matter how important the object is to us that we lose of a pair, we are somehow saddened by its loss.
Here is where perhaps you can come in to help me physically explain this act of collecting loss in an abstract, artistic way. In December, I am curating a gallery piece at the Sullivan Gallery in Chicago. While the piece is still in an early phase, I am looking for submissions from people around the world who have held on to an object that is one of a pair, a pair that is now incomplete due to loss. It can be a sock, or something more substantial. I am interested in your personal story of what the object meant to you, how you lost it, and why you held on to it. Also a photo of yourself (maybe even with the object). And, most importantly, the object sent to me in Chicago. These artifacts will be artfully arranged amongst other lost objects for one month. It will be a way for these objects, like my black knee socks, to collectively find peace together.
If you are interested in participating, please send me an email at tif@tifbullard.com and I will contact you with more details.
