In this episode of A Creative Excuse we get into a show that took three years to arrive. All the Lives Alive Inside Me opens at Hecho a Mano on September 4, a solo exhibition of printmaking and fiber art that traces the shape and texture of carework across Eliza Lutz's lifetime, from child rearing to elder care, from domestic arts to community organizing. The title started abstract and turned literal along the way. "Where you think you're going is never where you end up," Lutz says, "and that's sometimes my favorite part, even if it sometimes is hard to get there."
The work was made during a period of immense transition. After years of caretaking for three aging family matriarchs, all three unexpectedly passed away within five months of each other, and as Lutz and their partner sorted through the physical remnants of those lives, they found reminders of care everywhere. Lutz's partner's mother had been a French tapestry weaver, and they were going through boxes of yarn and weavings when the idea took shape. "You just start thinking about all of these ways in which these cycles of caregiving occur in families," Lutz says. The show became a way to pay homage to that reciprocity, made from clothing and fabric scraps passed down, using the matriarchs' own threads and yarn to build quilts, embroidered prints, and monoprints of reimagined sonograms.
"It lives on in all of these material traces that we're surrounded with from our loved ones and in our bodies," Lutz says.
Much of the conversation is about limitation as creative material rather than obstacle. Lutz talks about the parts of printmaking that run on brute strength, and finding ways around it. A professor at UNM, Yoshiko Shimano, told them to "just make little work and then make it huge," piecing enormous prints together a little at a time with the back of a wooden spoon. That lesson became the basis for a large installation, eight feet tall and built from around 120 individual small prints. "I can do one in a day if that's all I have the energy for," Lutz says, "and kind of build that up over time and still have access to making something large." The limitation becomes built into the work, a feature instead of a flaw.
Then there's embroidery, which Lutz picked up in a Zoom class and describes as the slow end of the slow spectrum. It doubles as chronic-pain management, one stitch at a time, in tiny increments. "It feels kind of like nothing in the moment in those tiny little steps," Lutz says, "but then you look back and you're like, oh, something kind of came from this." Kara names embroidery as a kind of language, a way of reading what time period and place a stitch came from, and Lutz runs with it: "It's a real language of time and a record of time." Now seven months pregnant, more literally full of lives than the title first intended, Lutz has become, in their words, more deeply rooted in this lineage than ever. In this episode we get into playing shows at Warehouse 21 at age twelve, the stability of being locked into a project, and what it means to make invisible labor visible and tangible to behold.