Astrid Kaemmerling + Becca J.R. Lachman

Our book-length collaboration HOME – SICK has been fueled by mailing and emailing stanzas, photographs, and mixed-media collages between SE Ohio and the Bay Area since 2015.

Through this creative cross-pollination and long-distance friendship, our work more fully enters our experiences related to body as home and space as story, even when that home is unsafe, unfinished, or carries weighty mysteries “too close to home” into our evolving adult lives and sense of selves. For us, some of these mysteries include unexplained infertility and personal trauma.

With lyric poetry, collected process material, and mixed media on paper, we aim to trace the outlines and shapes of stories related to our home building. Whether an actual house going through years of renovation, or a body and spirit doing the same, our work leans into and against the domestic, the feminine, and feminist. It depends on the power of female friendship to coax/demand/sing a story to the surface, and along with it, a life imagined or hoped-for into clearer view.

A general audience still wants an ending we can literally and figuratively live with: a healthy pregnancy, a happy family, a welcoming home, even a strong female artist who’s still “in her place.” We navigate alternative creation myths we have needed to tell in order to move into the rooms waiting for us, made for us, and made by us.

We step over the new threshold, touch

fingertips to final coats of paint and the walls are warm skin stretched,

expecting. Every angle and corner,

a country. We practice saying home, home until it feels more like translation.

You are safe. You are whole: What I tell my reflection.

What I say to this house.

The idea of a child grows first not in any womb.

For weeks, we cannot get to the piano. What brought us together, what made us break ground now covered in drop cloths, surrounded by sheets of drywall, the staircase pieces waiting to be built.

If you ignore something you love for long enough, does it find another door?

Our world began on the back of a turtle... after the fifth sun burned out... in a grain of wheat... at the edge of the garden... in the stomach of space...

And she was visited by an angel a nurse practitioner her sister’s fourth child a social worker a lawyer a surgeon a diagnosis a voice in a dream a pupa a contractor a book of poems a birth family

How does the story go again?

Becca J.R. Lachman works in the magical world of public libraries. She is also a poet, educator, essayist, and singersongwriter living in Appalachian Ohio. Her writing often focuses on re-visioning a feminist Mennonite identity. Editor of A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, she’s also the author of two poetry collections: Other Acreage, an ode-elegy to her family’s 1840s dairy farm, and The Apple Speaks, which explores being a wife/daughter of loved ones doing nonviolent peace work in war-torn places. Recent poems and essays appear in Connotation Press, Consequence Magazine, Image, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art.

Astrid Kaemmerling is a German-born artist based in San Francisco, CA. Her work as interdisciplinary artist spans the genres of visual, performance and media art and strives to connect place memories of the past, such as collected travel experiences, with a critical exploration of specific neighborhoods and selected urban places. Kaemmerling has been exhibited internationally in Germany, Italy, Korea and the United States. Kaemmerling’s work won several awards and fellowships, such as at the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy, the Vermont Studio Center, VT, and most recently at Enos Park in Springfield, IL. Current artistic research projects include a series of works that investigate “processes of home-building.” She is the founder of The International Community of Artist-Scholars, a community of artists who work at the intersection of art & research, as well as founder of The Walk Discourse, a Bay Area based laboratory for walking artists and walking enthusiasts to share walking art methodologies, practices and tools.