As disease weakens her, whispering artist draws "Ridiculous Body Blues"
Deseret News
Sunday March 12, 2000, page A1
Elaine Jarvik special writer
https://www.deseret.com/2000/3/12/19495718/woman-falling-br-as-disease-weakens-her-whispering-artist-draws-ridiculous-body-blues
To hear her, you have to lean in close. You have to block out everything -- the sculptures, the clutter, the trucks whooshing by out on U.S. 89 -- and focus on her mouth. Her voice is a whisper now, and most of her consonants have become vowels. So you lean toward her to hear the story of Man Falling.
Gay Lauritzen was 26 and a graduate student in art at Brigham Young University when she did that sculpture, which now sits in a corner of her living room in Mt. Pleasant. On a shelf in the next room there is a photo of her making the sculpture: a beautiful woman with strong arms fashioning a fat man's body out of plaster. The man has a big stomach but skinny legs with no feet. He has one good arm and one arm that is broken off halfway down, and out of that arm spills bits of hemp and wire.
"It's about the disintegrative nature of humanity," she says.
"Was that prophetic or what?" says her husband.
Gay rolls her eyes. Don't go taking any of this too seriously, the look says.
At 43 she is in what she's not afraid to call a rapid decline. Diagnosed eight years ago with a motor neuron disease (doctors guess it might be an atypical form of ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease), she is now a gaunt, stretched woman, all arms and legs and neck, a Modigliani without muscle tone. Her disease has progressed more slowly than the typical ALS, but recently it has quickened its pace: a feeding tube so she can eat, a voice that can only whisper, her upper lip paralyzed, a respirator at night. Her husband, a slight, gentle man named Kent Appleberry, has to carry her up the stairs now when it's time to go to bed. It is Kent who mixes Shredded Wheat with juice, then syringes it into the feeding tube.
Gay used to do sculpture. Plaster, clay, soft sculptures of lumpy old people. During her soft sculpture period, you could sometimes see her driving her old yellow Tempest with one of those life-size old people sitting in the front seat. In those days she went by her middle name, Nickle. After that she went through her Hollywood period, as a set decorator on movies like "Halloween IV" and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid." In the movie "Overboard" you can also see one of her soft sculptures -- a Greek temple -- in a scene at a miniature golf course, although to really get a good look at it, she says, you have to have a remote control with a pause button.
A torturous process
The first odd thing she noticed about her body was that one day, in 1991, when she pressed her middle fingers down on a surface, they buckled. Later, her hands, then her arms, then her feet and her legs got weaker. She could still drive till 1996, still yell till 1997, reports Kent, still write a wobbly version of her name even last year. As recently as March 1999 she worked as a set decorator for the new version of the LDS Church film "Legacy."
When she got weaker still, about a year ago, she started doing art on her computer -- figure drawings in various styles, some in black and white, some in bold color. Drawings of a fat ballerina, joyous in mid-leap; a whimsical piece called "What Have I Told You (About Juggling in the House)"; a beguiling drawing of a woman with a crooked neck; a print of a skinny woman with sad eyes, a heart on her sleeve.
Because she has virtually no strength in her arms or her fingers, drawing has become a torturous process that begins with Kent placing her hand on the computer mouse, then Gay twitching her body to get the right amount of movement in her shoulder. It's that twitch that makes her hand move.
Using a computer to draw means, ironically, having more control -- pixel by pixel -- over the finished product, but her technique adds an obvious element of unpredictability. "I now have a pretty wild hand on the mouse," is the way Gay puts it.
She sends her drawings to a printer in Salt Lake City, who produces them in limited editions. Her first showing of this work begins Friday, March 17, at Art Access II gallery in Salt Lake City, and you can feel Gay's urgency to make it a good show. "Through Thick and Thin," she's calling it, an allusion not only to the mercurial nature of one woman's life but to the fat and skinny figures she finds herself drawn to.
"I still like drawing large women," Gay explains in an Art Access press release, "and, stuck now in this skinny body, long for fatness. However, I've also begun to make images which explore my extreme thinness. Drawing my own body somehow reacquaints me with it in its new state. It also helps me see it as more beautiful."
Her most recent work is called "Ridiculous Body Blues," a title that comes from a friend who sat down next to her at a party not too long ago and said, "I don't know what God was thinking giving you this ridiculous body."
Three theories
Well, you say, What was He thinking?
Gay flashes you a smile that is also a grimace. "There are three theories," she whispers. "One, there is no God. Two, God keeps his hand out of the details." She stops. What about the third theory? "Oh, I know, " says Gay, her eyes getting big. "You Learn From Suffering!"
Like Job, you say. "No, I'm definitely not like Job," she answers.
"Sometimes," says Kent, "she does want to curse God and die."
"I still get mad as hell," she admits. Then she tells you about a friend of hers who worries about her own fat thighs. "She complains to me about her body. Hello? Hello? She just doesn't get it."
Gay has mixed feelings about her own body. On the one hand, she wishes people would notice something else. On the other hand, she hopes it will help them focus on their own miraculous bodies, the ones that can walk and eat, shift in a chair without pain, move a mouse across a pad.
So, does God have a plan? "It's like artwork," Gay decides. "It doesn't matter what the artist or God intended. It's what you get out of it." She has learned to let other people help her, she says, turning her face up toward Kent.
He married her in 1996, after she was already diagnosed. They had first met years ago when they were both students at BYU. "I think we met first at Cynthia's house," says Kent. "You were listening to me spout off about something."
Gay smiles and rolls her eyes: "It still happens," she says.
They lost track of each other for a decade or so and then one day someone mentioned his name and Gay sent him a postcard. Kent send back a 20-page letter. Later there was a four-hour phone call in which Gay went on and on about some guy who didn't love her.
She used to always be depressed about some guy or other who didn't love her, she says. And she was a workaholic. Maybe that's why she got sick, she says. Maybe it just took a toll on her immune system. Here's her theory: "Your neuroses get solidified." She has two more theories. Her body reacted badly to an antibiotic about 10 years ago and that messed her up immune system. Or, she had to learn some lessons.
"Everything used to come so easily for her," Kent says. "She had facility but not endurance. Now everything she does needs endurance."
And bravery, of course. She meets a woman whose father died of ALS. "Can I ask you a morbid question?" she says. "How exactly did he die?" Suffocation, the other woman says.
You watch her struggle to shift in her chair, tell you something, move the mouse. She slips farther down on the seat of her wheelchair so she can get the slightest rise out of her shoulder muscle. A woman, falling, you might say. Her ridiculous body lifting the rest of us up on her way down.
"Through Thick and Thin," showcasing the work of artist Gay Nickle Lauritzen, opens Friday, March 17, at Art Access II Gallery, 339 W. Pierpont Ave., and continues through April 14. There's an opening reception on Friday from 6 to 9 p.m.
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