Words of lineage, time, and nature

On writing artist statements, A Wisdom Body Series

My writing is an anchor between the internal and external. It navigates the interior for moments of tenderness and poignancy where initial inspiration takes hold and opens to the exterior to map how it will arrive in the world. This practice has always been about discovery for me, for observing myself and environment for cues, and listening to what a work desires to become. I allow it to live within, become my thoughts, my sensations, before transcribing word to page. In this action, the language becomes embodied as it moves through me, no longer words, but experience, as it transforms. I am conjuring something to come to a deeper understanding of the self in relation to self, nature, time, and lineage.

Much of my work centers around a feminine language that allows for time to occur circularly. The present moment is always continuous, moving backward and forward fluidly without a fixed position. This evokes the connectivity to nature and lineage, recurring themes within my work. I seek the ways that we are linked to nature, physically and spiritually, and write often into the dissolution of self into the surround, a return to where we belong. The tie to maternal lineage runs along the same thread. We are a culmination of all the lives, all the bodies, all the breaths that came before us to arrive in the present moment. We are of ourselves and always something entirely different. My work embraces this exchange and explores what it means to contain such multitudes. To accomplish this, I write work with often surreal elements that draw heightened attention to connection or elements of life we otherwise take for granted.

To engage with such themes, I work across genres in poetry, lyric prose, fiction, and hybrid texts. My experience in photography and design often filter into hybrid texts. The aesthetics of a work–each page, each phrase–is a pillar of my practice.

As Susan Howe said of writing, “I’ve never really lost the sense that words, even single letters, are images. The look of a word is part of its meaning–the meaning that escapes dictionary definition, or rather doesn’t escape but it bound up with it. Just as a sailboat needs wind and water.”

I recall her quote constantly as I am working, as every visual element has subconscious connotations that carry language. Especially in my poetry and hybrid texts, I think of how the space of each line, the design of each page, the juxtaposition of text and image, drives its comprehension. I am attracted how through this, a work may not just be read, but felt or even embodied as the eye traverses each letter on a white page.

Currently, I am working on two projects in particular. One is a novel, Sunflower Underground, that details the main character Vera’s grief after the death of her grandmother. She is of multiple generations who have lived in a vault underground to escape environmental collapse. While secure, she struggles with her recent loss of a beloved and her more permanent loss of nature. The novel unravels her narrative as she seeks belonging through heirlooms and her oasis working around plants in the agricultural center. Through distress, her comfort dissolves, giving way to surreal experiences and ever-growing longing to return to the surface.

My second project that I recently started is a hybrid collection revolving around my grandmother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. She was an artist, and I always found that through my own photographic practice, simply the act of taking pictures, I felt closer to her, knowing we had this shared way of seeing the world. Through this collection, I write ekphrastic lyric prose-poetry to her photography, accompanied by essays, contemplations, and images. It is a way of remembering, engaging, perpetuating that common spirit, of creating a familial artifact not unlike a photograph itself.

My projects are always an evolution, a new revolution of thoughts projected. I continue to seek after the images that linger in my mind just before falling asleep, that cause me to fixate and find language to make them palpable. I navigate the thin line between external and internal, real and surreal, where my writing emerges.

Find more artist statements by members and community of Wisdom Body Collective through our ongoing series of what drives us.