On a visit to Cathy Lomax's studio, I was drawn to this page from Norma Dunn's 1977 Floral Cake Decorating, which Cathy had stuck to the wall. We talked about marriage bars* and the tradition of leaving-cakes. This cake, which marks both a 21st birthday and an engagement, is for Lynette and Wayne, who are both real and unreal. Who were Lynette and Wayne asked to be? Who are they asked to be now?
My imagination hovers around Lynette, and all the Lynettes around me and inside of me. Lynettes who I want to save, who save me, who I exchange messages and gossip with, like glistening vitamins. Lynettes in glass corners, clutching at iridescent gleams, breaking through, getting splinters. History sometimes clings to the present like hidden rot. It has to be repeatedly shaken off, in quivers, gallops, longings, grasps and howls. The terrain has changed, but it is still as sticky as a fly trap.
Sugary domestic mirages might be lusted over, but escapes can be illusions and illusions can be escapes. Those with access to untamed channels hold on to them tightly at all costs, these high costs biting all around like sharks. Others, whose faces are, in Miranda July's words, shoved 'right down into it', jump from spot to spot, promise to promise, corner to corner, becoming heavy with strain but glimmering brightly in glitches, escaping, emptying, refilling thirstily in sparse chinks.** Betty Friedan's nameless problem has evolved.*** Rather than starving it, society has fed it new foods, allowing its clogging roots to support tinted glass castles. Scratch-proof towers that try to, in Audre Lorde's words, ‘keep us docile’.****
But there are other root systems too, that push slithering through the dark, glowing low but steady, sweating, baking and unbaking, accepting and refusing, finding new options. This tunnelling is a shared, ever-changing motion. Like painting, it requires looking from new angles, failing, rethinking, redoing, experimenting, sharing, over sharing, starting again and again. It means slipping out of the phantom of safety, ignoring plans, dreaming but not falling into dream. These tryings layer on top of the previous tryings, making a heaving humming that builds, subsides, builds and makes its own way, as if it is always only just beginning.
*A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations
** Miranda July, All Fours (2024).
*** Betty Friedan, The Problem that Has No Name (1963).
**** Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power (1978).
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