Under Pressure began as a dozen open tabs on my laptop, all of them having to do with the three-banded armadillo, the only species of armadillo that can roll itself into a ball for protection. One of only two armadillo species able to do so, I couldn’t allow myself to close those tabs, ever. The idea of this volvation, a defense mechanism deployed when threatened, fascinated me. Never before had I felt so curious (so envious?) of this behavior, this ability to quite literally shut everything out.
The southern three-banded armadillo volvation.
There have been seasons of my life in which I’ve felt this way — earliest memories of family hardship, certainly a majority of junior high, bouts of bad decisions into and well-passed college and then most recently, the coronavirus pandemic.
I don’t need to recount this for anyone; we were all there and to some degree, still in it. The physical oddity of this time which consisted of learning how to make homemade masks, going for walks in what felt like a ghost town, wearing bandanas over our faces while pulling children in a wagon, unsure of what was in the air, crossing the street each time we saw another person figuring out how to walk outside, too. We went weeks without seeing loved ones. Some of us would never see them again.
The emotional toll of working through a pandemic however, was perhaps the hardest to understand. Because you weren’t necessarily allowed to work through it alone. While trying to process how to keep loved one’s safe, in addition to ourselves, came the added pressure of being told what you were doing was wrong. Or that how you felt wasn’t justified, wasn’t right. You were trying your best but your best was wrong, by someone else’s standards. You were (are) trying to protect yourself but not how someone else believed you should be. It’s as if, you were being pried out of your defense mechanism(s) by the seams, going from a feeling of safety to a feeling of vulnerability.
Therein began the convergence of tabs and thoughts and emotional unrest. Just as I’d used origami to represent Syrian refugees and helium balloons to heartbreakingly depict school shootings, what material would best represent the delicate nature of self-protection being tugged at by society? My answer: ceramic armadillos.
Under Pressure opens on Thursday, June 16 at Mainframe Studios.