I am in the guts of this house
Pip Mamo
The walls shiver as they wake
Hand-dyed fabric, embroidery floss, found objects, thread.
The Walls Shiver as They Wake was the final installation for my MFA thesis research. It utilizes the imagery of the haunted house to reflect on the way both homes and objects become extensions of our bodies and minds. The haunted house is a home that has been invaded, disrupted, and disoriented. This work explores how disturbance to the home can function as a way to speak about illness, the out of control body, psychological distress, and tension between women and domestic spaces. In The Walls Shiver as They Wake, textiles, poetry, and found objects transform the gallery space into haunted rooms embroidered with fragments of poetry. The fabric walls shift as the viewers move through the space, inviting them to consider how their bodies relate to the spaces they inhabit, and the connection between body and home.
If my body is my home, illness has undone its domestication. Things live in my walls, my floorboards creak with invisible footsteps, and things lay in wait behind my doors.
The fabric panels in The walls shiver as they wake are embroidered with portions of a poem that is part diary entry and part haunted house story. This poem is fragmented and dispersed, unable to be read in its entirety. Instead, it is encountered gradually as you move through the installation. The exterior walls contain the climax of the story, which is transcribed for you here.
My body has left me here in this smothering pink.
The walls of my body are gone, torn down,
and I am now held together only by the grace of this house.
I try to stumble, to claw my way through the thick air
but I have no hands to claw with, no legs to crawl.
I am an endless expanse, but I feel so small, too small for this place, this trembling place,
but I have no body with which to tremble, so the fear runs out of me like scattering rats.
I hear their little cries, but they are snuffed out by this soft and terrifying vastness,
the smell of rust cloying and heavy.
I have never felt a love so terrible, all around me, a suffusion of sickly loving horror
like sinking forever faceless into the floor.
But can I sink now, bodiless and dismembered?
This house is always dark, always night, but I never sleep.
I have no mind to dream with.
I wish one day to close my eyes.
What does this house do while I am asleep?
Hand-dyed fabric, embroidery floss, found bed frame
What does this house do while I am asleep? is an early iteration of this body of work. It focuses on the bed as both an object and a symbol of our bodies. Objects become extensions of ourselves, and we form intimate relationships with our possessions. We are especially reliant on our beds to keep us safe. While we sleep, we are open, exposed, vulnerable, and completely unaware of the world around us.
My body feels so light,
like someone has strung me up above it.
I can no longer feel fingers on my skin.
