Still from video dancing in my studio at SAIC. This summer I’m experimenting with movement and listening for what emerges out of the relationship between media.
More than a year into pandemic times and my practice has undergone a series of dissolutions and (re)formations. The weight of uncertainty relaxed my ambitions in the marketplace and fortified my resolve to spend my days doing something that might matter even when no one could see. My practice used to be about doing things and now it is about the relationships between the things that I do.
I align myself in the lineage of cave painters. I imagine a shaman, in a rocky womb, painting for herself, painting for her people, and for the people who would come after her. I imagine her telling us something of what she knows and asking a question she doesn’t exactly imagine to really ever grasp. I imagine her talking in parables, in her gesture an attempt at making instinctual knowledge conscious. She only spends some time in the cave. But the time inside informs the way she collects food and cares for the young.
My participation in this lineage allows me to know something. I don’t know a thing, but I get to relate (to myself, to my environment, to my people, to our past, to our imaginations, to matter, to ideas) and relating has an emergent property.
But then I think, perhaps, it is better to think of myself as an artist in the lineage of The Big Bang. Afterward, the universe didn’t cool evenly. Out of the relationship between that variability came particles, came stars, came planets, came life, came us. My practice is to participate in what is. I practice colliding with matter, in the many forms that it takes. I paint, I dance, I animate, I sculpt. These are the things we call art but I don’t hold these boundaries. I think art is really in between these acts, these objects.
I was a hobbyist painter, in school to become an educator, when someone invited me to show my work. When it sold out I gave up my pragmatic plan and devoted myself to art making. That was twelve years ago. Since then, my practice has undergone many iterations, wrestling the immaterial by way of wrestling with matter.
I no longer expect to have concise answers to questions about what I do. I’ll keep laboring toward clear expression but that is the work and there won’t be any arriving. Unless death is an arrival, we shall see. Remembering death is also a part of my practice.
Professionally, I’ve given up (some of) the hustle in favor of making good art. And I’m resolved to make the hustle I must do an art form. I may not be able to sell what I make, but now I know my role as an artist is to support what I need to make in order to satisfy myself.
The space of a pandemic has invited me to stop identifying with a medium and a plan. I’ve practiced holding things lightly for years, but now I’m losing the illusion of control altogether. Increasingly, I surrender and I commit to this dance. I used to be professional because I earned income from the work, I continue to be professional because I commit to the work and trust that the work will take care of me.