Why a barbed wire heart? I grew up in the west and so my experience with barbed wire was inspired by a child-like perspective on a fence I saw everywhere. I climbed through barbed wire to go between my grandparent's property in Missouri and their neighbor's. There was a place in the fence where I regularly cut through the trees to swim in their muddy pond, or swing from the tire swing over the pond, or spend time talking to one of their horses with the neighbor's daughter.
This is what I thought of when I first read Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall and the oft quoted line, "Good fences make good neighbors". I saw the barbed wire fence as an easy portal to navigate between different adventures but also one in which one should keep mindful of the property owner whose permission you may or may not have had. And you knew which owners it would be proper to check in with beforehand and which ones you needn't be so formal.
When Michael Kelly created his iteration of the barbed wire he patented a "thorny fence" and Lucien B. Smith received the first U.S. patent for an iteration he called "thorny wire". I think of this when I read of the barbed wires role in the "taming" of the west and the displacement of indigenous people who referred to barbed wire as "the devil's rope". Maybe Robert Frost had something like this in mind when in Mending Wall he also has the line, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." Thorny indeed the fence can be.
I think of the barbed wire heart as protecting what you hold dear, what you love. And yet, yet it does so in a way that is semi-permeable, at least permeable enough for child-like adventures.
Then I think how seeing the image in "be my gateway, baby" of a red white and blue American map within barbed wires and it feels like a heavy shadow cast over the land within my own heart. There is a darker side to barbed wire to acknowledge. On my left hand there is a scar earned in first grade in Tucson. The scar runs from the base of my ring finger deep into the palm. I was running from a man in aviator glasses in a blue sedan who asked, "Hey kid, want a ride?" A fairly loosely strung barbed wire fence ran along a row of Velvet Mesquite trees separating a dirt lot from the apartment complex where we lived. That day barbed wire was a tale I told my mother about a stranger with aviator glasses as she bandaged my bloody palm.
And that's a bit of background on the pictured piece entitled, "be my gateway, baby (red, white, & blue)."