Two Rabbits or a Coiled Snake
by Em Rooney, July 2020

I hear ‘mommy issues’ a lot less then ‘daddy issues.’ Right now, as I think about it, this seems weird to me. Is it because I have been surrounded by people with vaginas most of my life, many of whom suffer some dull, well-worn lack of father? But then no. When I run a quick list of the men I do have in my life and I think about their fathers I think, yes, daddy issues. But it is precisely the ready-made, greasy handle-ness of the idea that I’m finding stale at the moment. Mommy issues are real and I think it might be bigger, more pervasive and definitely more complicated than daddy issues. Not surprisingly the language is harder to access. It has to do with the womb and what it feels like in there when you are perfect and your possibilities are limitless. You are seen/held/felt. Every amazing thing you will invent is ahead of you and already within you. The womb knows this even if the mother does not. The mother is a space and a way with your body in that space. 

I love the W and the O and the M in woman but there have been a lot of important people in my life for whom that word has been oppressive and I don’t want to say women & trans people, and/or female-bodied, and or GNC, or queers with vaginas, or to refer only to white women. 

So, here, I will say I always preferred womxn. Womxn feel like home, they refer to the eternal home. I have sought adoration from many starting with my mom and my sister and moving on up the line I could make a list of the womxn who I have admired and desired and sought out for love. 

When I first saw Rabbit I thought the shoulder was Sheliah’s. I’ve seen her in towels and swimsuits and thought I recognized it. Maybe it’s just seeing the rest of her family a couple of summers ago in Canada and realizing that they are fair and therefore I imagined her shoulder as one covered with freckles. Rabbit presents itself to me as an image of Sheilah hugging herself, which no matter how much I know it is Dani’s shoulder, I can only see Rabbit as a self portrait. Rabbit is Sheliah’s zodiac sign, and so okay, it is a portrait of Dani with Sheilah’s arm reaching out to hold her, but because I see one body more fully than the other the idea rabbit and the image of Dani merge and the artist—in picturing her lover— curves forward and points back towards herself.

Basically Sheilah is a lightning rod. She is a moving image on a screen. You’re like weeeeeeeerrp, and your head is turning to look and your body moves on its own toward her without asking you first. Add Dani and they are a place and I am pulled to it. It is a familiar type of attraction but it is so much more serpentine and Delphic then the one that routinely seeks male approval like a floppy wooden puppet (i.e. daddy issues). In the photo printed on blanket material we can see Sheilah’s ulnar artery pumping blood and beyond that in my mind’s eye I can see all the veins in her spidery, busy hands. I can see her with her hands in the dirt. I can see her fisting Dani and I can see her braiding Rose’s hair, gripping the steering wheel, sewing, throwing things, taping photo paper to Dani’s shoes, writing french in cursive, clicking at the keyboard a million words a minute. All those endless potentialities are beared in the work. To be a home, and to ache for a home—mommy issues. 

Because I have lived in Sheilah’s house and worked in her studio and watched her work this piece feels inevitable. I have studied the studio’s polished concrete floors, seen her sewing machine, slept in her bed and imagined these two tan freckled bodies under the covers. In Rabbit I feel the type of inevitability that comes with recognition; a Levinassian encounter. Care could be a word that is used here to describe a feeling in the work but we’d have to claw it back from its tiresome, citational use as a stand-in for feminine. Yes, care is all those things we think womxn do but it is also a responsibility to each other that I’m going to call instantaneous magic, and it is heavy. It is not the surprise of a mirror but something preordained, a triangle with a hole in the middle. In Rabbit there is Dani, Sheilah and Rose (even when she is absent) and (being suctioned toward some invisible center with dream-like gravity) there is me, or you the reader, or you the viewer.