PhD Body
by Heidi Biggs
Susan Circone, Underwater Moonlight, cotton, silk, cheesecloth, floss, 12 x 16 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
PhD BODY
Heidi Biggs | Sept 2023 | Issue 27
I walk around with my body like a double, funhouse mirror, she/they they/she are walking on top of paths we walked before more blindly, as if someone put tracing paper over a sketchy drawing and drew stronger lines this time. PhD body sees the youth, the people walking along the lines for the first time, through the scrim and loves them but can’t quite touch them, the way people touch when they are in love at the same time in the same place in the same iteration of life.
At a basement show, I look over at him and love him a little, even if he is twenty-four and on mushrooms and this basement holds other people so young I could be their teen mom. He bobs his head to the beat, wearing a snapback; I put my budweiser next to the pizza box on the washing machine where colored lights for the show are clipped onto the door. My friend Catherine is standing next to me, she is from the American Midwest, she is Polish, she can drink me under the table, she has been playfully terrorizing a boy who is very tan and earnest from New Jersey.
Snapback slowly makes his way across the room and asks if my ex is following me. My gloomy, ghoulish ex stands behind and to the side of me. I never told casual, beautiful SnapBack, but me and my ex are still complicated, connected. I say, oh no, they are just awkward and give off creepy vibes, and I get the feeling I’ve hired a watchdog. No one has looked out for or looked after me in so long. I’m a wild wolf, a hungry bear who lost their pack, who was taken up in an airplane using nets and moved far from my homeland.
I saw an alligator tv show the other day where the alligators get their snouts duct taped shut, their eyes covered, put in a big metal cage, and helicoptered away. And I think this is so sad. They knew that place, they knew the banks, the turtles, the birds. What audacious and unfair treatment, taped up and barred in. When the blindfold is removed to find a whole new terrain, the water on your scales is a different temperature, the neighbors changed, their bird calls have a different accent, they talk about different things. Where is home? Doesn’t home take time, even for animals? Home is never immediate.
Heidi Biggs (they/she) is a writer and academic living in Atlanta, GA. They have an interdisciplinary background, holding a B.A. in Literature, MDes in Interaction Design, and PhD in Informatics. They are currently a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology exploring intersections of storytelling, theory, design, and technology in relation to climate change. Their writing and research explores queerness, embodiment, land histories, and ecological entanglements and they believe we need new kinds of stories to imagine new worlds.
Susan Circone has lived on both coasts of the U.S. and currently resides in the Portland, OR area. She started quilting in the early 1980s and has been working off and on in fiber ever since. After learning the fundamental skills of quilt construction and how to dye and print her own cloth, she continued her art education at Portland Community College. Susan’s work predominantly uses abstracted microbiological and cell imagery that ties into her background as a research scientist in the geological sciences.