Chrysalis Corpus: Shedding skins with Coralys Carter

An interview with Coralys Tavender Carter, Processing Fellow 2022.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Coralys Tavender Carter and I am currently an MFA candidate at University of California, San Diego in Kumuyeyaay territory. I weave sculptural skins to be worn (and shed) exploring the concept of bodies rooted in spaces and places rooted in bodies. My work is a personal inquiry into my ancestral convergences and confabulatory processes using heritage craft as time travel to re/member myself in past and present, while ensuring futurity for me/we. My creative practice is a stewardship of the Taborn archive, my paternal lineage of tricksters and shapeshifters passing through. I am interested in embodiment, shapeshifting, and communal networks. I layer processes to create vessels for introspection, reflection, and transformation.

What was your fellowship project?

In late summer 2020, driven by desire for a network unveiled by participatory creation, I began planning an online/offline experiential project rooted in shared movement across time in hopes of bringing closer attention to our bodies, inviting connection and intimacy in an enhanced time of grief and loneliness.

This project begins by mailing skins I wove and carried with me through COVID and wildfire-caused displacement to friends with a movement score I wrote and a sound score created by Cy X. Each person lives with the skin for some days, moves through the shedding scores, emails a response to me (video, photos, writing, recipes, etc), then mails the skin to the next person who will do the same. I hope this project will carve space for reflection and release.

With the Processing Foundation I expanded this project within a supportive and resourced community–drawing connections between Processing as software, processing as a way to move through shared experience, time travel, coding, computers, looms, creation, birth, and life cycles fueled by curiosities such as (not limited to)– How do birth, death, and transition make space for intergenerational and interspecies imagination? How are leaf venation systems related to human and nonhuman kin’s networks of care and how are these mimicked by computer networks? Can an argument be made for computers as species? As companion? Looms as coding? Coding as creation?

What were the challenges that you encountered while doing your project?

My biggest challenge was myself lol. I was (am) in the midst of a transition throughout this fellowship timeline, and I had unrealistic expectations for how I would be able to engage all the resources Processing offers.I was hard on myself when not meeting these expectations.

The challenges were softened, though, by my incredible mentor Holly : )

What are some of the joyful moments that you encountered while doing your project?

Every time someone sent their projects they made after their time with the prompts and skins : )

What are words of wisdom you would have for future fellows?

Ask for help when you need it.