I Sewed Myself to Another Person

An artist friend of mine, who doubles as a professor at Transylvania, asked me last week to participate in a lashing video for a project he's working on. I thought lashing meant, well, whipping, but it turns out said artist friend, who we'll call Kurt Gohde, learned that lashing means going through or around something many times. At least that's what the boy scouts taught him.

Why me, I wondered.

I remember you having a lot of non-traditional piercings, he offered.

Turns out I'm more exciting in people's imaginations than in real life, but in an attempt to keep up appearances, I let him down with an upswing.

Well, actually, only my ears are pierced, but they are pierced all the way up them. Oh, and I'm related to a girl who had her tongue pierced and two of my sisters sported belly button rings. So, yeah, I'll help you out.

A quick call to Leiah to see if she was still hosting a gem on her budding belly led me to Matt's brother Mike. Matt is Leiah's baby daddy, and Mike is the smaller, younger, hippier version of Matt. (Mack, Matt, Mike... what are you trying to do to me people!) Turns out, Mike is also adventurously pierced, with a delightful hoop wrapping around the side of his bottom lip. He also has earrings, but since I had that covered, he offered up some lip. That's when things got really weird.

We used black fishing line, which kept reminding me of the thread they use for stitches, to sew my ear to his mouth, with a respectable distance between the two, mind you (I am an engaged woman now you know). The tip of the fishing line kept getting bendy, so at one point I threaded a needle and drove it through my ear. None of this was painful in the least since the holes were already there, but I have never felt something so weird as thread going through your body without pain. And then I have never felt so weird as being sewn to another human being, like we were in the very initial stages of become leather. And then I have never felt so afraid that my leather counterpart might sneeze and take my left ear right along with him. Fortunately Mike wasn't allergic to my fears and held it together for the entire shoot. We then cut ourselves apart and our bonding experience was over.

Never in my life did I think I would use my earring holes for something other than earrings. How delicious that they took on another role to create a piece of art, that in seeing them become distorted by the thread I realized how I am just another piece of material roaming this predictable little planet.

Kurt's exhibit goes up at the Lexington Art League in September and then at Transy in October. You should check it out. See more of Kurt's work here, here and here.