Hi everyone,
We are once again finding ourselves in Spring, which feels like the right occasion to finally dust off this mailing list and put it to use. I hope you are feeling born too.
I can say that word more honestly now, in all its beautiful and disgusting truth. I’ve spent the beginning of this year at a seasonal lambing job, helping lambs be born, and trying to keep the born lambs alive. I talk about this a bit below, so content advisory for brief mentions of animal death- nothing graphic.
Much of the work I’ve made in the last few years has been working through birth and death as inextricable. I find comfort in thinking of them as the same process, occurring simultaneously and constantly; being created always feels like dying, and endings feed new birth with all they were before.
I decided that if I were taking outdoor seasonal jobs now, to lamb would be honest; I’ve only ever been a passive observer of death, and never birth. I understood both processes so deeply as they worked in my own head, through spirituality and suicidality and wonder and grief. Death of old selves and birth of others. But I’d never witnessed in their whole truth the actual physical experiences that are depicted in much of the visual art I make.
So, I went to the mountains. I’ve been feeling fiercely private about it all, partially because I cherish being able to do that, but mostly because it's been deeply exhausting and often full of grief. To work with animals assisting in birth is the most beautiful and intimate thing, and to do so in capitalism can be the most gruesome twist. I haven’t felt ready to talk about it, especially not online. So for now, it’s just me and the lambs, and now you and this newsletter.
I still believe birth is death; it’s the most fragile shuddering thing. It’s disgusting and so incredibly wet and none of it makes sense, but then it works and you’re holding this small and sneezing thing. Or it doesn’t work; sometimes they die, there for a second, and then not.
And there’s a larger in-between space than I realized. Yesterday I found a lamb that I was sure was dead, and after pressing on his tiny chest in an imitation of CPR he sputtered back to life, breathy and surprised. I don’t know what it means yet to be the hand in the grey, pulling them back. But I find myself trying to wake in the morning with the same awe and fervor, surprised and pulled.
In its whole, my life right now is a mirror; after each long workday I find myself returning to dead and abandoned music and writing projects, ever grateful for the process of revival.
This is a long newsletter; I really didn’t know how to begin without explaining what the hell I’ve been doing and give some kind of context for my life outside of tattooing now. I’m sending it to both Chicago and Northeast mailing lists, since I figure it’s not anything place based and its possible many people think I moved to Chicago (not quite yet, and not off the table). But future emails will be shorter, infrequent, and ideally more writing rather than updates; I look to geniuses Seven and Rex, for the beautiful things they write each month in their booking emails, as something to aspire to.
My one actual work related update is that I also made a new set of prints, which you can find here. I have a hard time with all of the logistics involved in selling and actually shipping prints, so I’m excited to say all of that will be done by someone else who is good at it. They’re made with archival ink on really nice rag paper, which is also much better than I could manage at home with my current setup. I’m deeply proud of these as a diptych.
Anyways, sometimes birth doesn’t stick, and death can fool you. I’ve been reflecting, having put tattooing work to rest for now to build a different kind of life, and finding acceptance that I’ll reach my hand into the grey later when its time. Only on a guest spot basis and very infrequently, different from how I’ve ever done it, but it's something I look forward to. I’m excited to live this life more slowly, in years instead of minutes.
For now, I’ll be returning to western mass this season to work as a shepherd, grazing sheep at solar arrays (it is the funniest job I could think of having been raised Catholic, and much less intense/more restorative than lambing). I’ll work toward finishing a fuller and more multidisciplinary body of work, and I’ll be continuing to build this life.
All my best as we thaw,
Briar