One Massive Bag is a portrait of a younger demise doula: a holistic carer who tends to the needs of a dying particular person and assists their household after they die. Within the movie, made by US artist Each Ocean Hughes, a younger girl particulars the contents of her “corpse equipment”, whereas the gadgets grasp by strings from the ceiling on the respective heights of their use on the physique. The listing is prosaic however revelatory, comforting and unsettling: glue to seal wounds and tampons to plug orifices; snacks for the residing who overlook to eat; ice to relax, however – cautious – to not freeze. The doula considers the gadgets carefully, however provides mysterious choreography, rhythmically pounding her fists on her physique, slamming her thighs towards the bottom and marching across the house with religious fervour.
Proven alongside an set up of the suspended gadgets, One Massive Bag marks a shift into direct, materials work from an artist beforehand identified for abstraction. Hughes seems over Zoom from her residence in Stockholm, a form and effusive presence with a cropped bob and improbable hexagonal brown glasses.
Caring for her beloved grandmother Enid Hughes on the finish of her life set her on this path, she explains, although at first she spent a yr pondering she would possibly by no means make artwork once more. She nonetheless labored as an artwork professor however craved a extra tangible talent. “I’ve loads of buddies who’re unimaginable activists and I believed, ‘What’s my service?’ Then I believed, ‘Really, I can do that: I cannot flip away. I can take a look at demise, and the processes round demise.’”
Born Emily Roysdon, Hughes modified her title in tribute to her grandmother and Enid’s love of the ocean. Her demise additionally impressed Hughes to attend end-of-life doula coaching on the west coast of the US in 2018, which she calls a deep and intimate expertise. It’s a rising space: Finish of Life Doula UK at present has 220 registered members and acknowledges different UK practitioners outdoors the organisation.
Whereas Hughes hasn’t but practised, she considers it a part of her “long-term apprenticeship to demise” – one which began when her childhood greatest pal died aged 9. Her subsequent greatest pal died when Hughes was 15. “I don’t even assume I can start to restrict the influence it had on me,” says Hughes, who was raised in Maryland. “It gave me a robust spine and a few resilience nevertheless it additionally shut me down. I used to be fairly emotionally repressed for the longest time.” She connects the abstraction of her earlier works to “studying to outlive in my head. I grew to become an mental and I used to be a lot much less hooked up to something from the neck down.”
Discovering a queer neighborhood helped her break via that repression. Folks usually consider queer tradition in relation to popping out and sexual politics, says Hughes, “and absolutely that’s current. However for me it was additionally encountering a political neighborhood of people that have skilled grief and trauma.”
She discovered it at hippie Hampshire School in Massachusetts, the place she made buddies with such feminist artists and zine-makers as K8 Hardy. Later, in New York, she met JD Samson, who would go on to hitch feminist punk bands Le Tigre and Males. Samson grew to become her first girlfriend and obtained a tattoo of Hughes’s face on her arm – after they broke up. These experiences, plus discovering David Wojnarowicz’s well-known {photograph} of Peter Hujar as he was dying, “opened this door to artwork and grief and queer tradition”.
One Massive Bag has a selected resonance within the Covid period, when many households have been compelled to observe family members die over video name, however Hughes really began creating the work in 2019. “I didn’t wish to then flip it into pandemic work,” she says. “However in fact, the context is profoundly modified. The entire world is confronting demise each single day in a method that you could’t flip away from.”
She would moderately body One Massive Bag within the context of “queer demise”, an rising space of research. For Hughes, this implies self-determination “for people who find themselves dying to consider the truth that that is their expertise”. Lindsay Rico, who performs the demise doula, describes the significance of various hair braids in demise preparation, and the way a demise doula for an LGBTQ+ particular person might must defend their needs to relations and the healthcare and demise industries to ensure their identification is revered.
Watching One Massive Bag crammed me with a wierd aid on the doula’s functionality and an understanding of a very good demise as the final word type of respect – one which the residing would possibly be taught from. Hughes agrees. “For those who can hook up with someone in respect for his or her life and their capability to self-determine their demise, then you must be capable to do this in life as properly.”
Naturally, company isn’t an possibility with sudden deaths – and nor does it attain equally throughout racial and financial divides. “Making this work shouldn’t be solely a few ‘good demise’ however about public deaths, in regards to the information, about coverage.” Throughout her analysis, Hughes studied the extraordinary historical past of Black funeral properties, which performed a vital position in the course of the civil rights motion, providing hearses and vehicles to maneuver leaders across the South discreetly and changing into a spot for activists to assemble. “Then that turns into a political website – conferences round organising and communities had been occurring in funeral properties.
Throughout the pandemic, she took lengthy walks and listened to an audiobook of The 5 Invites by Frank Ostaseski about what demise can educate us about residing. “I lastly did expertise pleasure about my grief and my experiences,” she says. As an alternative of feeling “heavy and unhappy” about her earliest childhood pal, “I lastly had this second the place I used to be grateful for ever having had the connection and for him having put me on this path.”
The accessibility of this challenge has been a revelation. “With grief and dying,” she says, “folks lose management. What strikes me essentially the most is that this factor of not figuring out and letting go. You possibly can solely be current. If there’s a spot to be taught the lesson about letting go in life, that is the second.” She laughs. “You can not management it.”