ONE HUNDRED MILLION SPACES (studio 5 baby)
There have been times I’ve wanted to become the couch. Crucified by the comforter. A steady diet of melancholy. I’ve been places I thought I’d never come back from. In the nebula of my grief - feeling the clouds hollow me out, and send me back out spinning. I’ve been low and high and in-between and that’s just the thing right? We’re collecting experiences. Big, small, quiet, loud, scared, in love, forever, and brief.
Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) by Rachel Whiteread. It’s one hundred resin casts of the undersides of chairs. Those quiet, overlooked voids we rarely think about. Translucent and softly colored, they glowed gently in the long, echoing gallery. Each one a ghost of something once useful, now made precious by the simple act of attention.
It changed the way I think about absence. About what gets remembered, and what gets left behind. About the value of the mundane when someone finally decides to look.
My husband and I recently moved to a small town in West Virgnia to help with my grandmother in her sunny age of 103. It was one of my dreams as a kid to live here. Mountain towns with nothing but fireflies and trees, and winding rivers. Mountain folks have a sense of independence and spark I always admired about them too. But this town is a place that, to many, would fall under the category of forgotten. The ground here is soft in some places and hard in others, like it can’t decide what to hold or release. There’s a heaviness that sits on the hills. It’s in the scars on the land, the teeth of the folks who carried the industry, their pain, and the folks who were products of pill mills and circumstance. In the same breath there’s the sigh of the people who carry so much weight of their families. They hold it all together and many do it with a fierceness only taught by hunger.
Coal pulled from the hills, health pulled from bodies, generations shaped by an industry that gave just enough to live, but always took more than it returned.
My grandfather grew up in coal camps, where workers were paid in company script. Not real money, just tokens that could only be spent at the company store. A closed loop, designed to keep people underground.
We like to think we’ve come a long way from that, but I look around town and wonder. Fast food chains, big box stores, and empty storefronts. Convenience, yes. But also a newer kind of extraction. It offers a kind of nourishment, but never fullness. Just enough to keep going.
Lately, my husband and I have been living in that “just enough.” We’re waiting on the results of his I-485 form. We work when we can, try to make enough to keep something growing. A little garden. A sketchbook. A slow dinner. Then we wait some more.
That waiting has become its own space. One that feels both quiet and loud at the same time. Familiar and heavy. But I’m learning to look at it the way I saw the spaces beneath chairs. To see what usually goes unseen. To name it, mark it, hold it up in the light.
We go for walks at night. We notice the flowers pushing up through cracks. We let ourselves daydream. The moon reflects off the pond, the dog sniffs the air like she’s reading sunshine.
There’s tension in all of this. Between being invisible and wanting desperately to be seen. Between being in motion and having nowhere to go. Between survival and creation. Even writing this is a kind of contradiction. A way of trying to make the quiet louder. A way to cast the invisible into something that might catch the light.
But I think there’s something sacred about choosing to see beauty in the overlooked. About honoring a place and a moment not because it’s glamorous or easy, but because it exists.
Forgotten doesn’t mean empty. It means waiting. It means holding memory. It means space enough for something to grow.
And I think, maybe, that’s enough for now.
