Nonfiction by Jennifer Weigel
I am still processing everything that has happened over the past year and then some, in part due to COVID and in part due to life. These haven’t been the most difficult times I have endured, nor have they been silver linings amidst challenges, but they kind of came at me out of left field and I stood there reeling for quite some time.
Early in 2019, I found myself without my voice: I had nothing to say, no art to share. When I first started making art again, I began by taking photographs of the empty sky. Not the nuance of color as you near the horizon, but as close up as I could zoom in on the most flat blue tone I could find, resulting in a pixelated wash of color with no real content.
This sense of drift eventually subsided and I was able to make art again. Flash forward to now, I have returned to photo documenting my surroundings and have even taken up horror writing. I am drawing and painting again. I am no longer at a loss for words. But I still feel incomplete and uncertain.
It’s funny the things you notice when you are in the midst of change. The butterfly is a symbol of metamorphosis and of becoming, but it is fragile and fleeting. Beauty and life are much the same. As I was walking down the sidewalk, I noticed this diminutive shard of a swallowtail wing and was struck by its delicate beauty. I have always noticed things that lie unobserved, some of which can be difficult to gaze upon because they bespeak past violence or hardship that cannot be undone. But at the time, it stood out as a symbol of the past year, the anguish and the hope.
I stood and stared at the wing for some time before a gentle wind caught it and it blew away like an unspent wish. This is my reflection upon the course of the past year and a half. I don’t entirely know where it has gone. I have experienced a lot of changes, some good, some bad. The wind has carried away the time and my thoughts with it and I still sometimes find myself reeling, gazing up at the sky awash in blue and contemplating the fragility of a found butterfly wing.
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media: assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and won numerous awards.
