Why More Barn?

     I thought I should get closer to the barn, on a day when the wind wasn't trying to pry it apart.  And as I photographed the internal topsy-turvy wreck behind the facade of the barn I felt pain and incredible sorrow.  I wondered why, particularly when I showed the photographs to my husband and he said "They're beginning to get a little redundant."  So why did they hurt so much for me?

     Then I spend four days with my Mother.  She pulled one of her classic bait & switch emotional manipulation soul crushing song and dances, and I remembered my Dad saying while he was dying, "Our family is broken, and it's all my fault!"  At the time I told him "no", and calmed him down.  But I have come to realize he is right.  I have a dysfunctional family, and my father allowed my mother to emotionally abuse her kids by choosing not to see it.

     To the outside world my family always looked fine, like the facade of this old barn.  But meanwhile the barn's insides were crumbling, and now the rest is starting to go.  I understand this place, although it also frightens me.  But I need to see what happens when it all falls to the ground.

     I left home when I was 19.  I love my parents, because they're my parents.  But my true family has to exist on the outside, because the inside is not safe.  I think that's why in my sculptures I've been putting the outside in.  And I think this is also why, as Ben said, I seem to be just "scratching the surface."  I mean, who wants to go into true-confession mode; it sounds all full of self pity whiney, and I that is not how I want to see it.  But I guess since it seems to be coming out in my art I have to name it, and like the barn, see where it takes me.