In my work, fluid and Sci-Fi “Creatures” engage with and learn from their non-human companions. I look to all the animate species surrounding me for relief from the intensely gendered and capitalist present. Living between Kansas and Missouri, I speak to the lost and critical connections between my body and the local environment. Spending time outside, I realize a greater kin I have been neglecting: the birds, water, animals, and plants that also call this place home. Using painting, ceramic, and installation practices I imagine a world where bodies are more than their physicalities and the wisdom of the more-than-human beings we share this world with are prioritized over profit.
My figurative paintings and sculptures challenge rigid notions of gender. I explore the strangeness associated with being a Queer body, the difference between the liberation felt within oneself and the ways I feel my body is perceived by others. I embrace the fact that over fifty percent of the body is water and enjoy thinking about all the tiny, symbiotic organisms that share a home on and in the body. While the flesh is often seen as a boundary for where bodies begin and end, my paintings often feature watery paint that spills over these edges. The paintings embrace fluidity, a body seeping into and becoming part of its environment.
The ceramics speak to a different reality, the felt edge, a solid form in three-dimensional space. These figurative forms are covered in wild medicinal plants of the prairie, species which have healing properties. The plants and figures provide protection and restoration towards one another. Ceramics are inherently more fragile, like a body in space. The plants and figures work together, plants providing coverage and stamina to the body; the body recognizing their importance, carrying them forward.
In “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” adrienne maree brown writes, “What you pay attention to grows.” Additionally, she shares Toni Cade Bambara’s inspirational words, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” These sentiments fuel my current work, envisioning new ways forward in this often-harrowing world by paying close attention to how other species are surviving. Creatures engage with the more-than-human world as guides and teachers to counter ways of being.
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