I've been trespassing.
Some notes on a current project
My project1 spans approximately 362 acres, though not all are accessible to the public. Twelve acres are part of a greenway I’ve been walking intermittently and with varying degrees of commitment since last year. It’s questionable whether I’m trespassing on the remaining 350 acres, though I don’t lock my car. The remote chirps and government buildings are nearby. I walk with purpose, reading the markers on the ground. The camera and tripod are slow to set up, and the process is pleasantly cumbersome.2
Precious Soul Known to God is inscribed on several markers. I walk around the open field gauging the light. Specifically, I'm calculating the length of time I will have to stand in 27-degree weather with windchill waiting to make an exposure. The camera is large format and there is no aperture, viewfinder, or shutter. Guesswork and chance are part of my process.
"Opened in 1923 as the "Tennessee State Home and Training School for Feeble-Minded Persons," the name was changed to Clover Bottom in the 1940s. The facility closed in 2015. Most residents' families made arrangements for burial elsewhere, but a small on-site cemetery was maintained. An archeological survey in 2012 found a minimum of 185 graves in five rows. Graves that are marked usually only have a surname and initial with no dates due to federal and state privacy laws regarding patient records". 3
The cemetery was not part of my original research, but the grounds of Clover Bottom, broadly, are. I connect the various landmarks I see on my walks, some public, some private, some state-owned. Whilst walking the greenway, I spot a water tower in the distance. The water tower is uphill from one of the marshes I’ve been documenting. One side of the marsh is along the greenway trail, but the other is adjacent to a road with a No Trespassing sign, which I only violated by ten feet or so last summer. While trespassing, I discovered the water tower stands across from the cemetery. On one of the warmer winter days when the lighting was harsh but not so cold, the smell of cafeteria grease filled the air.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I understood Clover Bottom to be a mental institution living up to the tropes of the time. In reality it was even worse.
Mental illness was not talked about, nor acknowledged in my family. This is complicated by being from the American South where eccentricities are considered the norm. My mother had a deep interest in Edgar Allen Poe and taught me to spell macabre at age 6. I learned about melancholia at an early age as well.
I didn’t know my father as an adult. We had a complicated relationship made even more complex by our individual struggles that remained unspoken. After his death, my mother would tell me his moods were due to medication but never elaborated. A former neighbor, who was perhaps the only other person my father confided in, once relayed that he hated the way the medications made him feel. That he was “not himself” when on them. Lately, I’ve been piecing together the neurological and psychological makeup of my family based on letters and photographs, but I mostly rely on memory and what little oral history I recorded.
There is a cutoff for how long I will stand in the cold. If the weather is sunny, it’s bearable, but I will also have harsh light. Yesterday, it was overcast and freezing. The lighting was perfect, but my light meter suggested I would be standing still in the cold for an hour. It is unlikely a government official will tell me to leave, but fingerless gloves are only about 85% practical. While assessing my tolerance for cold, I make a mental note to bring hot chocolate next time, and I suddenly remember the joy of sharing a thermos of hot cocoa with my dad while sitting on a felled tree in the woods of some property we owned. There’s no agenda. We’re simply sitting in the woods, sipping hot chocolate. The memory is vivid. It’s winter with overcast skies. The leaves are brown. There’s an open field below. My dad is wearing a wool buffalo plaid hunting jacket, which I found in the attic years later and had dry-cleaned. I don’t wear the hunting jacket while trespassing.
I am not a project-based artist unless I am working with film or video, but occasionally I feel the need to have a conceptual container with a beginning and a stopping point. More often than knot though, my work is an entanglement (see what I did there) of ideas and ongoing interests that ebb and flow throughout my life.
This project is made possible by a Current Art Fund Grant, a regranting program administered by Tri-Star Arts through the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Find a Grave. Clover Bottom Developmental Center Cemetery. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2405147/clover-bottom-developmental-center-cemetery