This article is a prequel to ongoing research into DIY Healing Within Ancestral Lands. A project born of growing up in a family system that was not kind, welcoming or loving. I did not belong. And of being purposefully isolated and cut off from another family system that was not much better. I started this research because I needed to find a way of healing and improving my relationship with myself and others. To be the kind of parent I wanted to become.
I approach creativity as
- An organic process of discovery and communication;
- Lived experience research to generate grounded theories of how we are, and could be;
- Developing a philosophy of how to be;
- And as prefigurative practice for healing, transformation, and wisdom of the interconnected personal, familial, and social.
Straddling the line between compassion and satire, I work with art as…
- Objects that are artifacts, communication tools, and propaganda.
- Experiences, emotions, and ideas.
- The process of making as politics, therapy, investigation, tension, transformation, and manifestation of potentiality.
- The “work” of art is contextual and determined by who is making, experiencing, retaining, and discarding, in any combination, and shifts at any given moment.
- Life. And life is art.
\nŏ-stăl′jə, nə-\
(verb): 1. the act of creating, imagining a "better" past/other context that we would feel valued and flourish within 2. Imagining a past/other through creative remembering and forgetting; collaboratively and singularly
We nostalgia past place/other to compensate for, soothe, escape a current context; usually one of neglect, abuse, abandonment.
We also nostalgia to alleviate feelings of shame, guilt, loss, and alienation as a result of the above.
Unfortunately, the act of nostalgia minimizes agency (personal and collective) and flattens the complexity of relationality and context.
*An entry from A DIY Healing Dictionary of Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Being. The dictionary is a work in progress and part of the larger DIY Ph.D. - Prefiguring Learning for the Ecocene performance.
\ är′tĭst \
Definition
(noun):
1. a person who co-creates and communicates intentional, reflexive experiences with perspective.
2. a person who interacts with and processes the world primarily through aesthetic experiences, i.e. art.
*An entry from A DIY Healing Dictionary of Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Being. The dictionary is a work in progress and part of the larger DIY Ph.D. - Prefiguring Learning for the Ecocene performance.
warm, inviting, kind
and yet
hiding
probing
interrogating while
observing
in front of and behind
that invisible two-way
mirror…
dancing near and
toward each
other,
holding still,
nearer,
holding,
nearer yet…
hoping
the other does
not back away.
both wondering
what patterns we may be repeating,
will this person accept me will they treat me as well as I’ll treat them will they treat me as well as i deserve will we enjoy each other’s company will they run away…
