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.
\ frē′dəm \
(noun): the capacity to imagine how things might be elsewise, with the flexible support to try, and the hope of possibilities.
(adverb) freeing: the state of imagining possibilities; relieved of the restraints of the singular, opened to the multitudes of potentialities.
(verb) to free: 1. to imagine, illuminate, share, and explore potentialities. 2. to flexibly support, facilitate, or otherwise encourage exploring potentialities.
Often conflated with related concepts of autonomy and agency. Is social as much as personal.
*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.
Definition
(noun): A shared experience of the past, present, and future.
(verb): How that shared experience is interpreted and used to define, organize, manage, and motivate a group.
Can be place-bound in a confluence of time, geography, and/or people.
Often expressed as shared memories, objects, rules, artifacts (arts, architecture, planning, everyday objects, etc.), behaviours, beliefs, language, ideals, and values.
Can be created intentionally or unintentionally.
Is co-created, though not necessarily equally or with equity.
*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.
