Lauren Frances Evans (she/her)
Mowed Down, 2021
digital video
It felt oddly appropriate to spend my 31st birthday weed whacking the yard. It was June 2020 and I'd spent the past 3 months couped up in a small house, working from home alongside my husband and our attention-starved 4 yr old. I was stubborn enough to use a weed whacker for an entire year to cut the grass before my husband insisted on buying an actual lawn mower this past fall. In the midst of the confinement of the early pandemic months, this time to myself spent tending to our yard in this rather inefficient and time-consuming manner was tremendously cathartic. At times it felt like my only escape from the constant drain of pandemic parenting. Overlaid in transparent layers, this footage I recorded from my time spent in the yard that day functions much like my own headspace during that time, almost always in two (or more) places at once, spinning, ever on the move, and often to a rather nauseating extent. Now, nearly a year later, I work in the yard in the same striped overalls and yellow-green sandals, marking time in such an embodied way. It's the first time I've been able to fit into these overalls in many months, my body still bleeding from giving birth to the baby that, unbeknownst, was already within me on that bright June 2020 birthday.