Personal Grounds

A friend and I went downtown today and saw Personal Grounds, an exhibit at the City Gallery by Susan Lenz, a fiber artist who lives in Columbia. I was much more intrigued with the ideas in the exhibit than I was in the art process, although, this woman is definitely very creative, talented and prolific. She must stitch  in her sleep!

Personal Grounds was a series of nearly 100 portraits -- photographs transferred to muslin with hand embroidery, embellishments, and stitched text -- each representing a decision that person made.

To be confronted with such a large number of individuals who made one choice or another somehow honors the integrity in making a clear choice. Sometimes one person's decision was the exact opposite of the decision represented by the portrait right beside it (Atheist - Born Again Christian, Refused to Put My Father in a Nursing Home - Placed My Father in a Nursing Home). The whole exhibit brought awareness and personalized the huge number of the big and small decisions we make all the time.

Here is one of the first portraits and choices that grabbed me. . .

I've always had this thing about "Voting as a Feminist Issue." Now here's this woman with very little time or energy left in her life, and she chooses to spend some of each casting her vote, having her say, influencing the future. Wow.

This one is called Illegal Immigrant. Susan's notes said all the portraits were taken from photographs, obviously, of real people. This man is shielding his face because it would be dangerous for him to be recognized. As an American, I can't even imagine that going to another country and living there illegally would offer me more opportunities than staying here. Wow.

Many of the decision points illustrated were related to health issues. . .  mastectomy rather than chemotherapy, pursuing aggressive treatment, opting to end treatment, a man going public with his battle with breast cancer   I like this one, called Warrior, about choosing to do everything possible to stay healthy after a battle with cancer. Look at how complicated life gets for a Survivor Warrior:

Other big areas of decision included choices about family -- to marry, to have children, to marry when one really wants children and the other really doesn't, to adopt, to give a child up for adoption, to search for a birth parent. . .  Other decisions didn't seem as big -- one woman choose not to have a television, someone else chose not to own a car. Lots of choices related to personal appearance -- hair dying, head shaving, losing weight, a drag queen. . . here's a woman who chose tattoos. . .

All that body art is done with machine stitching.


There were several about ways people chose to do good in the world. A volunteer who gave 3 1/2 hours a week to a museum for something like 34 years, a woman who visits and writes letters to prisoners, a very moving one about a child who declared, after noticing her mother's driver's license, that she too, wanted to be an organ donor. She was killed in a car accident when she was 11, and her organs saved the lives of seven other people. Fittingly, this one was called The Gift of Life and the portrait included everyone in her family.

I like the representation of the blood donor with the little red sequins mounting up the frame.

There was more. In the middle of the gallery, all these sheer panels hung from the ceiling with questions stitched on them -- all the little questions that run through your mind all day every day. . . should I wear the dress or the pants suit for my court appearance?, send a letter or an e-mail?, let me daughter go the party when I haven't met the parents?, decaf or regular?, Mac or PC?, how can I say this tactfully? This list is endless -- there were about 30 panels, two stories high, each with probably 25 questions. . . See what I mean? When does this woman sleep?!

I'm glad I got downtown to see this one.