Connecting the Dots: The Band-aid House and Re-Invent Gallery

Connecting dots sometimes resembles drawing a daisy. Starting at a single point, looping around to create a petal, touching back to the point and looping around again and again till a beautiful or fragile, or bruised flower emerges. The first loop began on a rainy spring night at a brewery bar in Lake Bluff. While I waited for my friend Nancy caught in a down-pour I chatted up the waitress Kristin. By the time Nancy arrived, I learned that Kristin waited tables to cover expenses while she gathered resources to open an art gallery. The following weekend Kristin and I met at a coffee shop across the street from the space, previously a florist, that she found for her Re-Invent Gallery in Lake Forest, IL. A few weeks later an email popped up in my mail box from Kristin with an introduction to Camille, an artist who creates large installations, room-size… house-size projects made from odd, old or found things. Kristin said she wanted help in finding locations for them in children’s hospitals. My career and current job deal with hospitals across the country. The request felt mundane but the art aspect made it intriguing.

More loops. Camille grew up with an older brother’s who’s lived most of his fifty years in a facility for severely disabled in Jackson, Michigan. Jackson, home to the worlds largest walled prison, I know, not because I was incarcerated there but because it is also the location of my first job out of college as a health educator in a agency that managed Head Start centers in three counties and other programs for families in poverty. Many of our clients had ties to the prison. Hired on as the “health coordinator”, Camille and I overlapped our lives there... dots connected.  Her hands outlined the shape of a house as she described the bandaid home she designed to keep him safe when she was five. Time, construction help, money… enough bandaids never came together to allow her to build the house for him. In the years in between she went to art school, saw her work in galleries and married a successful advertising executive. Nine years ago, they had a daughter who cried ten hours a day for the first ten months of her life. Camille said that her life, her art stopped at that time. It took years to find her way back. Finding the right medication for her daughter helped, but that took nearly eight years before they could call her daughter functioning. When she could get away, time with her horse helped too. Camille and Kristin have a mutual friend who let Camille show her horse while hers healed from a foot injury. The borrowed horse stood eighteen hands high, much taller than her own. Camille fell during competition on a Friday the thirteenth last year and broke thirteen bones… one more and it would have paralyzed her. She’s better she reported, but still not exercising much. She looked skeletal to me, when she described nonchalantly the back braces she endured; no doubt food would be a secondary interest after pain control.

Looping further. Camille the artist who knows color said everything was dark then. I pictured the almost black-blue of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and a room with the shades used by people who sleep during the day, closed allowing no light. Camille must have seen a prick of light and knew that art offered relief, but her physical limitations prohibited her from constructing large installations. In a file folder tucked deep in a drawer years before, she pulled a picture of a painting she saved with the idea, she might attempt something similar herself one day. She began painting and more light poured in and the dark depression lifted. She began to see friends again and visited her horse.  Her curiosity about family returned and she Googled a cousin she hadn’t heard from in years, curious whether she’d find a death notice or jail sentence. She’d suffered from mental illness and spent years on the streets of San Francisco. Her name came up, showing she was now married, now functioning and now an artist, with paintings the same as the ones Camille created. 

More loops. Last November, Camille brother needed a simple medical procedure, a colonoscopy. Because of his compromised immune system and because he came in contact with something with vile germs while in the hospital, he contracted MRSA, a virulent, horrendous, often death inducing staph infection. Camille could only build him the house she envisioned for him as a five year old.

At five years old she manufactured things, she’d called them small installations when she described them to me, made with paper, popsicle sticks and tape… lots of tape. Back then she wanted to protect her brother.  Like a bubble, she conceived a house of bandaids. Watching her brother deteriorate, she asked her husband to help construct her art house, but unlike years before when their lives were simpler, before their daughter, before her accident that limited her mobility, he couldn’t manage that and his work and sharing the care of their daughter. She walked out the front door of her home to think. Sitting on her driveway was her next door neighbor’s twentyfour year old son who she hadn’t seen in years, house sitting and taking handi-man jobs before going abroad. “Come into my office”, she told him and they designed a house together. It’s 10’x10’ in eight panels and much more than four walls. From the outside a person can stand and look in through a portal and see themselves dressed in vintage clothes; another where a visitor can kneel and see a reflected sheep with their own face. Looking from the inside out, the walls away from the house have video scenes showing the movement of the wind in fields and forests and waves on a river.

The flower emerges. Her brother survived. The Band-Aid House  showed in a gallery. Local public radio interviewed her and she’s waiting from a call from a gallery in France. Currently her living room contains a ten foot boat built by the young man who helped her build the house and she is creating sails made from tape and Bandaids. She hopes to have them installed together and tomorrow she meets with the president of a hospital board.

Kristin connected me to Camille and Camille touched me with her story.  I ticked off the dots of people I could introduce her to and organizations she might contact including an artist friend from Jackson, a link to a bandaid company, names at hospitals who view art as an asset. When I mentioned the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, which focuses on bettering the way health care is delivered, like eradicating MRSA and harm that comes from wrong-side surgery, she told me that as a child an operation was performed on the wrong leg. In the hour I allotted for our networking meeting to ostensibly to help her affected me, I learned so much about Camille. I raced there feeling on edge to make the appointment on time. I left her softer, my heart opened to her pain, aware that bandaids soothe that pain and bandaid art creates joy. Needing to leave, we got up from our table at the coffee shop, walked out toward our cars and ran into Kristin… the loop closed… for now.