When the pandemic began in 2020, I was running a small flavored butter company called Wise Butter out of a shared kitchen on Main Street in Nashville. My business closed and reopened several times in the subsequent years as I’ve turned from devoting my life to the chain of consumerism. When my grandmother and forever bff Peg died in April 2020, my whole identity began to unravel. I began to understand myself as a genderqueer non-binary person and became engulfed in that truth that had always existed but had never been “made real” by identifying it with words. When I had to clean out Peg’s house, it became evident through my personal artifacts that I am a part of a chain of loud-mouthed “difficult” women who experienced all kinds of gender dysphoria and dealt with it by trying to self-destruct via maladaptive coping strategies. The hatred from being misunderstood was always turned inward to undercut our unique self-expression.

Sorting through my past life, I was overwhelmed with the question of what to do with the ephemera of my childhood experience given that I will not be having children of my own. In the summer of 2022, I used my old artifacts to forge a voice for the othering I had always felt in society, most cuttingly by my family. I began making assemblages with the intensity of someone who is gathering things to take out of a burning house. I wanted my inner vulgarity displayed in a way that looked vaguely like a weapon, but with the lighthearted zeal of Delia Deetz from Beetlejuice, “This is my art and it is dangerous.” It’s broken dishes and weird little knots I've tied around my old shit in an effort to transmute it for one last hoorah before it/we hit(s) a landfill. In Nashville, we have a place called Turnip Green Creative Reuse. I get part of my artifacts there. I’ve also started picking up litter that “speaks” to me as I go through my mundane daily routines. I want my personal effects to tell a story that encompasses us all. Blending our old pictures and lists. Art litter that all of us recognize ourselves and our transitory nature in. 

These are my old artifacts juxtaposed in new meaning via the ephemera that conjured me. The objects I couldn’t part with. My Lazarus Trash. 

• Clothes that don’t fit & aren’t worth donating. 

• Every pretty dish I’ve ever owned that got broken. Dishes “gifted” to me by southern women intent on pecking me into the patriarchy. 

• Out of focus doubles & triples of photos that weren’t worth printing and got shoved into a box instead of put into an album. 

• Old hair I once kept as “evidence.” 

• Keys to buildings that no longer exist. 

This work is my rejection of perfectionism some women in my life have tried to apply to me like a rubric. I could never fit their molds, so here are some of mine I made up. I identify as a childless recovering perfectionist baptist manic pixie elder goth trying her best to feel her way through the world without the help of maladaptive coping strategies designed to keep me small and quiet. Thanks for witnessing who I am today through this ritualistic expression. I hope to carry on the legacy of these objects and transmute pain through this act. 

@plathhack

Man-sized video