Bake their Faces in the Oven, Harvest Moonlight from the Kitchen Floor

Phoetry: Bake their Faces in the Oven, Harvest Moonlight from the Kitchen Floor

Photography by Marcelles Murdock

Essay and Fiber Art by Nicelle Davis

When pursuing the writing life, how far should an artist-parent drag their child along that wild and often rugged road? I don’t know. I don’t. I know I have a kid, and that I have a need to create. I know I love both, but what cost is each one to the other? In many ways love is the divide—the line that makes gamblers or cowards of us. We walk a narrow path with possible destruction on either side in hope of maintaining our domestic-life and our life-as-artist. Yes, the two lives are different; however, if we are lucky the two converge and the world of parenthood and childhood become one.

Let me try to better explain the process: I have my student hold their faces, hands, or feet in a pie tin filled with plaster of Paris. I learned to make casts by working on molds my father; I catch myself sounding uncannily like him as I warned my students, it’s going to get hot, but, most likely, it won’t burn you. Using plaster of Paris casts, I pour a mixture of glue, latex, and glitter to create replicas of their faces, hands, feet. Yeah, it’s a little creepy, but the result is something oddly lovely; I end up with a fabric that resembles sheets of plastic. This material holds light well—as if there is a fire burning within the replicas. I then assemble the entire piece into one mask—a face of many people. Sure, it’s freakish, but the students seem to like it—it gives them a physical sense of being remembered—of lasting—which is the comfort of art. The work is brittle, so to increase its permanence I asked my dear and talented friend Marcelles Murdock to take pictures of it.

For the photo shoot, I wanted to make a dress to match the mask, and so poured this same mixture of glue, latex, and glitter across my entire kitchen floor. (We are talking six gallons of Elmer’s glue all over my floor.) My son and I had to eat out for three weeks while we waited for it to dry. I felt terrible, imagining all the awful things he must think of his crazy mother. But when it came time to peel the strips from the floor, and the light caught just right on the material, my son turned and said to me, “Mom, we are harvesting moonlight—we are harvesters of light.”

I have no way of knowing if he will always think of our time together with the same amount of poetry. Because the world rarely monetarily values poetry, I assume my son (who likes to be right and the world to be defined) will soon abandon his job as a light harvester; soon he may think of his mother not as an artist, but a freak. I don’t know. What I do know is there are moments when life and art intersect—when watching babies learn to walk meets the honor, we hope to pay those who came before us; there are times when the two sides of my anger and anxiety over the past and present unite to create a light that cannot burn—only illuminate.

Marcelles Murdock is a Californian artist with a love for analog photography and a great desire to expand into the world of instillation art. When set free from the confines of the daily grind, Marcelles enjoys exploring the the beautiful desert valleys and mountains that surround his home. Although his artistic endeavors grow at a sluggish pace, he revels the sublimin the idea of all the beautiful earthen creations he and his friends create.

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist who walks the desert with her son J.J. in search of owl pellets and rattlesnake skins. Her most recent collection, The Walled Wife, will be available from Red Hen Press in April 2016. In the Circus of You is available from Rose Metal Press. She is the author of two other books of poetry, Becoming Judas, available from Red Hen Press and Circe, from Lowbrow Press. Her poetry-film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world.

Originally Published at LunaLuna