Animating the Interior By Nikē Baneberry
Ecology - Intertwined - Interdependency - Crip Time - Transformation of States
Water Drops + Disability
Before a rain the smell of petrichor disperses through the air: this word - petrichor - describes specifically the smell of the moistening of the ground before and during a rainfall when chemicals from plants are released into the air contributing to the distinctly earthly scent so familiar with spring. Petrichor also signals the decrease in barometric pressure creating the soft tissue in joints to swell up causing stiffness and soreness. So this petrichor for me is more like petri-chronic: and reminds me that my body is seasonal and in time with the earth's weather cycles. During a rain, the lower oxygen in the air makes one sleepy - igniting our desire for tea and a nap. Rain literally makes me slow, groggy, and brian foggy. The rain room is a celebration of this mind/body/earth connection: welcoming the sacred ways our bodies know when there is going to be pain, with the same body wisdom we know there will be rain.
In this drawing, I have distorted the rain room by kneading it out lengthening the height of the space so that rain falling from the central opening has more time and space to fall - it is allowed to cascade slower. The worm’s eye axonometric of the rain room brings me into the moment when I am under a cloudy sky looking up as rain drops down towards me. Depending on where I focus my gaze, it can feel as if the rain is hurtling past, whizzing by my face, but if I look farther ahead, I can trace a single drop on its long descent towards me - my mouth opens and my eyes close, time slows. This is so familiar to the way I experience criptime: like rain, stretching out the sky. Crip time is the stretching of a movement: the slowness of standing up, the seemingly long nights of pain. Crip time is knee time - the rate that they need to heat up and loosen every morning. The way crip time pulls us out of the ticking and tocking of the chronometer (clock time) and allows us to deepen into the creaking and cracking of the chronicmeter (pain time).