Spring Cleaning, Anxiously

Last week in SW Ohio we catapulted from winter straight into summer. Eighty-five degree temperatures make spring cleaning a lot less appealing to me. Have I mentioned I hate heat? Instead of dusting the ceiling fans I turned to virtual spring cleaning. I was so wrong in thinking this would avoid excessive sweat. I've been focused on rewriting my Etsy profile, the About page on my website, and coming up with something for my blogger profile. Writing a bio is an excruciating exercise in which it is all pain and no gain. Talk about blood, sweat and tears. This is hard. And embarrassing.

I thought I'd have an artist's bio to reference, from days past when I used to exhibit my photographs more often. Turns out I never used one because I never wrote one because it's so darn hard. Coming up with the artist's statement left no time, energy, or desire to write a bio as well. I find it next to impossible to write a normal artist's statement, let alone a bio. By normal I mean not pretentious. But when I am on the spot to describe and explain the inner workings of my mind, to spill my guts for all to see, all I want to do is cocoon myself in soft, warm blankets and drink spiked hot chocolate. No one else I meet for the first time reveals their most vulnerable secret self (or when it feels like a stranger is doing just that, I try to get away fast), so why should I, as an artist, be expected to do this in a statement for all the world to see? I'm getting anxious just thinking about it.

Annette and I have logged countless long-distance minutes over the past week in what I have come to refer to as our own personal artists support group. But as soon as I sit down to write my bio, all the brilliant, encouraging, helpful, and grounding advice we give each other flies away. And I would typically describe myself as fiercely independent, strong-willed, and confident. Where does this person go when a more revealing description is wanted?

Before I go call Annette, I'll share one of my artist statements. Hmm, it doesn't seem all that pretentious or revealing. Some of the sentences are awkward, but nothing a little editing can't cure. Maybe I really can do this after all. 

Old Maid, In Name

Photographs by Laurie Lundin

Throughout history, the unmarried woman has been feared. She has been maligned, stigmatized, and pathologized. She has been tried and killed for being a witch; institutionalized for not fulfilling her natural role as breeder; ostracized for displaying her sexual desires as mistress, lesbian, onanist; tolerated at best for being a caregiver and teacher.

Within publications about and for the single woman from the early 19^th century to today, reflections of and arbiters of societal standards, it remains constant that women do not stay single by choice. Unmarried women experience, “frustrations, depressions, restlessness, which come from such a disastrous denial of a woman’s natural rights to biological and psychological completion.”¹

This has not been my experience nor the experience of the women I know and admire. In an effort to debunk the image of the bitter, desperate spinster Old Maid, In Name is a lighthearted look at the stereotypical roles and traditional professions proscribed to unmarried women.

Laurie Lundin

September 2006

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[1] Smith, M.B. The Single Woman of Today: Her Problems and Adjustment. London: C.A. Watts & Co., Ltd., 1952.