Inside Every Ocean Hughes’s ‘One Big Bag’

“The first time I heard somebody say they were going to wash a dead body at home, I froze.”

So begins Every Ocean Hughes’s One Big Bag, a forty-minute, single-channel video installation currently on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. In the film, a millennial death doula (performed by Lindsay Rico) details the contents of her mobile “corpse kit” she uses to care for the living and the dead. The items hang suspended with twine in the space around her, and they variously address the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the deceased and the bereaved: glue to seal autopsy wounds, tampons to absorb fluids, and ice to keep the body chilled, as well as ritual objects like ceremonial bells, scented oils, sage, and scarves and shawls. As she introduces these objects one by one, Rico moves forcefully throughout the space, at times running in circles and at times slamming her legs to the ground, inviting the viewer into greater embodied awareness—as she notes, “Death has to be understood with the senses. The mind doesn’t get it.”

Hughes, a transdisciplinary artist who splits her time between Stockholm and New York, has spent the better part of the last decade staging performances that aim to foster greater awareness of the processes of death and dying, inspired in part by her own experience caring for her grandmother at the end of her life. One Big Bag is the second piece in a trilogy of such works, and the film draws from Hughes’s training as a death doula through the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, as well as her own stories of grief and caregiving.

I initially learned about One Big Bag through my day job as a palliative care chaplain, when one of my colleagues at the hospital reached out to ask if I would go see the exhibit with her—she had just gone and wanted someone to talk to about it. We went together the following day, and I immediately understood what she meant: One Big Bag is an installation that invites conversation.  In that spirit, I reached out to Hughes to see if she would be open to an interview. Over the course of an hour, we discussed the materiality of death, how art can help create new rituals, and the care that becomes possible when we refuse to turn away.

To start off, I’d love to hear more about the background for One Big Bag. You’ve said that you consider it to be part of a trilogy. So how did the series come to be, and where do you situate One Big Bag within the trilogy? One Big Bag is part two in the trilogy. The first part is called Help the Dead, and the third part is River, and both of those are live performances. I knew when I aimed to make One Big Bag that I wanted it to be a video so that it would be more easily accessible and distributable. Performance has great potential in what one can do with an audience, especially around death work, and I value that so much, but I also wanted to make something that was able to be distributed, and that became One Big Bag.

The series started in 2018, when I was helping my grandmother die. She was one of these grandmas who’s also like your sister and your mother and your grandmother—bless those of us who have that. I was doing that care with my mother and her best friend, and the three of them raised me. My mom and her best friend were hospice volunteers my whole life, and funnily enough, it took me a while to remember that, because I had just taken it for granted when I was a young person running around a hospice house as they were caring for somebody who was dying.

So we were taking care of my grandmother, and I kind of slotted into the role of spiritual care. My grandmother and I had a very tender connection. My mom and her friend knew how to moisten her lips, but I knew how to be present with her in a different way. We were caring for her for about two weeks, and as we were there with her, I started searching for tools—I began reading more about hospice rather than just using the inherited wisdom of having grown up around it. That’s when I really started to think about [death care] as a skill that I wanted to develop.

My grandmother’s death coincided with—and perhaps sparked—a time in my life where I was also thinking about service. I had been an artist for twenty years, and now I was asking, How can I be of service in a different way? And this is what I knew I could do: I could not turn away from death and this kind of suffering.

As a young person, I had several friends die in accidents when I was 8, 15, 17, and 19. It just kept happening, and I was in rural Maryland in the 1980s, and nobody said to go to therapy. I had no tools, and as I grew up, I knew that there would be a time in my life where I had to take care of that part of myself. It has been my biggest teacher. Being alone with that grief had been the structure of my life, so this became the moment to deal with that.

So I wanted to be of service, I wanted to take care of myself, and I also realized that I’m still an artist while I’m doing this work. And that’s how those threads came together.

Exhibition view: List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist.

Another thread of the series is the notion of queer death, and you cite the Zen monk Issan Dorsey and his establishment of Maitri Hospice during the AIDS epidemic as an influence in this regard. So what do you mean by queer death? Yeah, I think the word queer has gone through a lot of expansion in recent years. For me, in using it as a modifier to death, I wanted to create a sense of spaciousness and a kind of opening: What could that mean? It’s certainly tied to the history of AIDS hospice programs and the communities of care around the AIDS crisis. Queer history is what put me on the path to being an artist, and so I wanted to connect that to this kind of care work.

A lot of the project of One Big Bag is really trying to create the conditions for people to stay with death instead of turning away from it.

So queer death is really threading together the activist work, the creative work, and the communities of grief. Those are the things I’ve tried to pour into that phrase. But mostly I think it’s a moment of pause for someone to be like, “Queer death, what’s that?” Because a lot of the project of One Big Bag is really trying to create the conditions for people to stay with death instead of turning away from it.

In queer death there is also a focus on self-determination, and I’d say that one of the primary aims of a death doula is to help people develop tools for self-determination. When you die, it is often a moment of extreme normativity, but those doors and conventions have been opening up so much in the last years. That’s one of the things I want this whole series of works to be surfacing: There are a lot of options out there. For a long time there weren’t, due to the hold of the funeral industry and conventions of religion and culture, but now there’s a lot more space.

It’s been really inspiring seeing that space open up, and that ties to the way that One Big Bag approaches ritual, specifically the possibility of creating new rituals—to be able to draw from different inheritances and not be stuck in things that don’t quite fit. I was wondering how you think about ritual, both in end-of-life care and in art making. How do you see these forms of ritual interacting in your work? Well, I think that’s an astute question because that’s exactly what the video tries to do. In that last scene in particular, there’s this moment where Lindsay Rico, the performer, says that [the work of a death doula] is a kind of staging, acknowledging that the time of death itself and the rituals we produce around it are all a kind of staging. There is the kind of focus and intensity there that we tend to associate with performance. In prior works I’ve written about something called alive time, thinking about quality of time in relation to practices around death and dying and also art making. So it is a kind of staging.

Every Ocean Hughes, One Big Bag, 2021 (still). Video with sound, 40 min. Courtesy the artist.

In terms of the performance, I was so taken by Lindsay Rico’s style and how direct she is in her movements and facial expressions. It made me think of the Buddhist teaching of the gift of fearlessness, where one of the tasks of a teacher is to give fearlessness. That gift comes through in how Lindsay speaks about moments of diminishing fear, as well as in your new photograph, How to not be afraid. Can you talk about that choice of directness and how a doula can guide someone through the experience of fear? Well, I love this whole line of thinking. The one thing that I was directing for, I would say, is competence. I really wanted her to carry this material and carry the viewers. And so I feel like a lot of the directness is in the writing. It tries to be plainspoken and not precious. I’m not trying to overdetermine what is sad and what is funny because with so much around grief and loss, you don’t know what’s going to trigger your need for relief or release with humor. So I wrote it in a way in which all these things are present.

With the choreography and the way that Lindsay’s working her body, I worked with a choreographer, Miguel Gutierrez. Miguel was able to read the script and meet Lindsay, and he created a bunch of gestures that I then went through the script and applied at certain moments. And it was sometimes about giving Lindsay relief as a performer and sometimes about offering a kind of relief to the viewer, really trying to bring the body into relationship with the materiality of the objects. That was also a thread that I was trying to weave throughout the whole performance: this material question of the body and all of these things that we use for care.

For the photograph, How to not be afraid, I wanted to play with the very old tradition of memento mori and still lifes, which were typically candles and skulls and rotting fruit, but now we have a different kind of aesthetic object that is used in relation to the body. So I wanted to aestheticize that and formalize that but also make a portrait of how to not be afraid using these mundane objects.

How to not be afraid (Still Life), 2025. Giclée print, 45 × 52 1/2 in (114.3 × 133.4 cm). Courtesy the artist.

The objects really do so much work, because especially at the List Center, you see them on the screen and in the photo behind you, but they’re also suspended throughout the room. It’s like the viewer is invited into the space as well. Could you talk about the materiality of death care and how these objects take on new meaning in this different context? Yeah, one of the places from which this specific work arose was the recognition that these objects change. There’s this whole topic of thing theory, where something goes from being an object to a thing when you have a different use value connected to it. For me, it’s not maybe the most forward part of this whole project, but it’s something that I think is present. So it’s the materiality of the corpse and of all of these supports that we have in our lives, and then how they are transformed in their use at the end of life. I think that people feel their way through these points at different parts of the script, and also when you walk around the room and you realize that the diaper’s at the height of your hips, and the gloves are at the height of your hands, and the comb’s at the height of your head. It brings you into the room and thus into relationship with this content in a really grounded way.

Exhibition view: List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist.

Totally—I didn’t realize until I was walking around the room that all of the objects are all at the height that they would be used. In that way it becomes a kind of death meditation, where you’re confronted with the materiality of death in a very different way. Do you see the project as a death awareness practice in itself? One hundred percent yes. That’s why I made One Big Bag and why I put all of this effort into the aesthetics: to make it something that people actually spend time with. You know, there’s an awareness in contemporary art that people watch videos for something like forty seconds. And I am very moved that with One Big Bag, usually people sit down and watch the whole thing, and that’s the quality of Lindsay’s performance. It’s the directness of the address. It’s the material itself, of death being the only universal thing. And it’s all the effort I put in to try to make it something that you can stay with instead of turn away from. That was really the impetus that has been driving it.

Sometimes people are a little unsure if they’re allowed to say that the video has information in it, [like how to wash a body or keep it cold]. And this was of course very purposeful—the video is an art project, and there are a lot of questions of practice and aesthetics inside of it, but it is also delivering information. That is the death awareness. And hopefully all of these threads braided together become this platform so that someone can be a little softer to their own fear or apprehension or experience of grief.

I also wanted to ask you about the final moment, because it feels like a moment of softening. As the video comes to a close, Lindsay begins to cut the threads holding all of these objects, and she places each of them inside this big bag. And at the end there’s a moment of surrender: She’s trying to pick up this bag, and after trying again and again, ultimately she falls back atop it and closes in a song. Can you talk about that moment and your decision to close with a song? Yeah, I love that: surrender. When we cut down the set, we couldn’t practice that. As an artist and as a performer, that’s a moment of surrender: to not be able to rehearse and only be able to do something once. I have done many years of making context-specific performance, which is very different from theater. So having theater and film people in the room where they asked, “Well, how are we going to rehearse that?,” and I was like, “We’re not”—that’s also an enormous surrender.

Every Ocean Hughes, One Big Bag, 2021 (still). Video with sound, 40 min. Courtesy the artist.

My absolute favorite moment in the film is in that last scene where, in the way that she moves, Lindsay hits one of the bells, and then it starts swinging back and forth. I could have never coached her to do that because she would have been too encumbered in trying to remember to hit that note. But instead, it just happened. And so the bell starts the rhythm when it swings from side to side, and then it’s the last thing she cuts. So, in a way, it’s like the bells have been present the whole time. They’ve been the sound and the song that carry us to the moment where she actually changes her voice. And that’s what I wanted in that final scene: to go from her being so competent and forceful at times to softening a little, to having the bag be a burden, to maybe not be able to actually move it, for it to be heavy from all that stuff. And then her voice changes. That’s how I approached it with her: It’s not really singing; it’s more like finding voice.

The final phrase she sings is “how to show love, how to not be afraid, welcome it all, push nothing away.” Some of that song is from Frank Ostaseski’s Five Invitations—the first two lines are mine and the last two are his. I take a lot of pleasure in writing these projects and in the power of music and voice, especially around grief and ritual. There’s a reason that we raise our voices and sing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes, organized by Natalie Bell and Zach Ngin, is on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center through December 14.