There was a storm last week that blew the shirts around

It happened on June 19th, a Thursday evening storm that was strong enough to knock out power in some neighborhoods and blow down some trees. A dead branch broke off the cedar tree in our backyard. Here you can see the branch lying across the shirt, which blew off and is lying in the dirt. And you can see that the blouse, which is more securely attached, swung around behind the fence onto the neighbor’s side.

I think about rules when I make art, about what the constraints make possible. I like to leave the shirt overnight if it gets blown down, and hang it back up the next morning. The blouse I pull back over the fence right away because, as we know, good fences make good neighbors and it seems poor manners to leave it there. But even though leaving the shirt is my usual practice, in this case it fell on top of some helleborus plants that I want to live, so I hung it right back up.

But other rules have also emerged. I went to take my work to show at Philly Crit, and realized that I really did not want to take the shirts out of the backyard because the rule is that they are to hang there for the whole year, and so I left them there, and brought my laptop along for a slideshow instead.

See how it gets rinsed off by the rain and goes back to white the next day? Not what I would have predicted. But then, there is so much we don’t predict.