Two Half Exhales Equal One Breath
Natalie Hunter
Two Exhales Equal One Breath
2024
Hand cast gypsum, birch
Approximately 8" x 4" x 5" installed.
Two Half Exhales Equal One Breath explores aspects of embodiment, touch, labour, human bonds, acts of care, health, the senses, and memory. Through sculpture I create an intimate portrait of my mother, focusing on her breath, what makes her human, and how my touch as an artist can relate to human experience, the creative act and labour. In this sculpture I use the cast in an attempt to capture and hold my mother’s breath in material form. Asking her to breathe and attempting to catch it as a bag of air, I make embodied casts of her breath out of gypsum plaster. Each breath takes shape in my hands. In this gesture I ask myself, How do you catch a breath? How do you hold light? How do you hang on to a memory? It’s as elusive as trying to catch the wind. For many years I’ve been trying to understand what it means to want to try and catch and hold my mother’s breath. She is someone who suffers from a lung condition called Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and finds the act of breathing a daily struggle. Each of her breaths are equal to half of my single breath. By catching her breath, I translate a seemingly immaterial and weightless human experience into a solid material form.
Growing up in a working-class, blue collar family with strong roots in Hamilton’s industrial steel manufacturing industry I’ve come to understand the complex relationships between manufacturing production in the industrial sector, and the eco-anxiety felt by the increased atmospheric pollution that affects healthy air quality. As a child I suffered from asthma, and breathing illnesses run in my family. Cities like Hamilton and other post-industrial cities across Ontario are known to have very poor air quality and higher respiratory illnesses in children and the elderly. As both the daughter of a steel worker, and a daughter of a chronically ill mother, I am conscious of this paradox: industrial manufacturing professions are needed to build a growing nation, stimulate an economy, and provide working class people with decent paying jobs. But this same industry creates environmental problems that affect human health. Two Half Exhales Equal One Breath reflects on this paradox and brings awareness to our evolving relationship with post-industrial cities and our increasingly fragile planet.