Loneliness is a complex experience that carries with it a social stigma, and even a sense of shame. I am no stranger to the experience of loneliness and have experienced extended periods of loneliness at various stages of my life.
Many years ago, when I was single, I was having a conversation about this state of loneliness with a writer friend, who was also single. We had a great conversation about the difference between feeling lonely and being alone. Both of us realized that writing and making art are very solitary activities.
Then, as a new mother, I experienced loneliness in a very different way. Being home with a small being who needs a lot of care, is a different kind of loneliness. And now since COVID, the experience of loneliness has become even more layered with anxieties about health risks added on, and the practice of social distancing and isolation in lockdown.
But there is an undeniable feeling of longing for connection, the lack of which creates a sense of emptiness, as if the passing time itself were empty. I named this feeling “Empty Time,” to fully capture the complexity of it. To me, the phrase “Empty Time,” is a fragment of a sentence that suggests solitude, loneliness, and a fugitive feeling about “filling” the time with activities in which one is alone.
The Loneliness Epidemic
Not surprisingly, the CDC has identified loneliness as an emerging epidemic. The Health Resources and Services Administration has researched the public health implications of loneliness as an epidemic, especially amongst seniors. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research found that loneliness and social isolation can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and more damaging than obesity.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General has called loneliness an epidemic that hides in plain sight in his book. Particularly poignant is Kristen Radtke’s graphic novel about America’s loneliness epidemic.
The good news is that there are several initiatives now to address loneliness. The UK-based Campaign to End Loneliness believe that people of all ages need connections that matter. They have started several initiatives including a podcast, conferences, and grassroots campaigns to reduce loneliness. In the US, Art and Healing has a launched Project UnLonely to offer solutions such as creative expression through the arts, and community partnership.
Anti-Memorial to Loneliness
My approach to create more awareness about loneliness, and also to help people create more connections, is to create a durational site-specific installation comprised of glass vessels arranged to form the phrase “Empty Time.”
The vessels have hand-blown glass and are inspired from the collections of American Swedish Museum in Minneapolis. The vessels are filled with colored water to varying levels, and the color saturation of the water to create a color gradient from light to dark and back to light. The water is allowed to evaporate over the duration of the installation.
Audience Participation
The audience is encouraged to interact with the work by lightly touching the vessels with small bamboo or reed sticks, thus creating musical sounds, and animating the work as well as the space in which it is installed. It was thrilling to see perfect strangers come together in the installation to create music together.
The fragility of glass is especially appropriate to physically manifest the tenuous premise of Empty Time. The liquid in the bowls metaphorically “fills” the time, but also evaporates, thus alluding to the ebb and flow of being “empty” and “filled”. Similarly, the echoes of the sounds produced from the bowls “fill” the empty space momentarily and then return it to silence.
Counter-Memory of Loneliness
The Empty Time work is a playful, interactive, and experiential installation that inspires multiple meaning-making possibilities in the viewers. It is an innovative way to counter the negative memories of loneliness. And it provides a fun group activity for people to break the ice and make connections that they may otherwise have not made in a typical gallery setting or social gathering.
Empty Time is a continuation in a series of sculptural poems, which are an exercise in paring down to the essentials, to the core, and an attempt at finding the “more in less.” These text-based artworks play with the fractured nature of language, as a means of communication. Language can make connections between human beings, and also easily break them.
These limitations of language can be overcome by art and music, and to create a more connected and less lonely world.
Website URLs: www.pritikachowdhry.com, www.countermemoryproject.org, www.partitionmemorialproject.org
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More about:
Pritika Chowdhry is an artist, curator, and writer whose artworks are in public and private collections. Pritika has displayed her works nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions in the Weismann Museum in Minneapolis, Queens Museum in New York, the Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey, the Islip Art Museum in Long Island, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, the DoVA Temporary in the University of Chicago, the Brodsky Center in Rutgers University, and the Cambridge Art Gallery in Massachusetts.
Pritika is the recipient of a Vilas International Travel Fellowship, an Edith and Sinaiko Frank Fellowship for a Woman in the Arts, a Wisconsin Arts Board grant, and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant.
Born and brought up in India, Pritika is currently based in Chicago, IL, USA. Pritika has an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Visual Culture and Gender Studies from UW-Madison. Pritika has taught at Macalester College and College of Visual Arts, both in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Published scholarship about Pritika’s work has come out in peer-reviewed research publications and various exhibition catalogs. Pritika has presented her studio research projects at various national conferences, such as the International Arts Symposium at NYU, The Contested Terrains of Globalization at UC-Irvine, and the South Asian Conference at UW-Madison. Pritika also participates in panels and gives lectures and the artist talks about her work by invitation.