Stay at home order

 Fabric Installation in Mustard Field, 2019-2020, Irvine, California

In early 2019, I set up a fabric house in a patch of mustard. I wasn’t sure what to expect and had vague goals: I wanted to watch the mustard’s life cycle enclosed under the mesh roof and walls. I wanted to closely monitor it, tag the plants, and follow them individually to see what would happen. I had dreams of time-lapse video and an expansive, pseudo-scientific art documentation.

But the next week we got the stay-at-home order.

This house began to take on a life of its own while I was in my own home. My original thoughts about life and death, and health and sickness took on new meaning during a raging pandemic. My own house both protected from the outside threat of COVID and concealed our fears inside. 

In the garden house, life was bursting forth inside and outside. The work was making itself. And when I left my house to visit or received photos from friends who were checking up on it, I asked myself: What was invasive? What needed eradicating? The Mustard, the virus, my fear…?

And other questions: What does it mean to care for something? What does it mean to be inside—a house or a body—when disease is all around…or inside of it?

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