Artist Statement

The stories we tell about our lives shape what we’re able to imagine, and what we can imagine determines what we can do. My job is to change the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the earth is cherished and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives. Because once we truly imagine it, the pull to create it becomes irresistible.
Aurora Levíns Morales¹

An expanse of white cotton rag paper floats off the wall, a vibrant pinkish-purple hue emanates from behind. A textile constructed of laser-etched and intricately cut flame-orange tissue paper blankets the luminous surface of the paper. The cloth is host to so many wrinkles and folds that, at times, it resembles freshly tilled earth. Playful loop-de-loops of needlework surround the centre of the fabric like twisting tendrils stretching towards the warmth of the afternoon sun. Flowers joyfully bloom on each corner, a garden of feminized labour nurtured and so tenderly cared for. ‘big sick energy’² glows triumphantly at the centre of the linen, the seeds of crip³ imagination resting in the fertile soil. The scent of fresh, damp earth weighs heavy in the air.

The stories we share with each other are transformative, planting seeds of resistance and radical tenderness while tending networks of kinship and care. My research-creation practice centres crip storytelling as queer alchemy. A critical tool in transforming intersecting oppressions into evidence of chronically ill, mad, d/Deaf, neurodivergent, sick and disabled ingenuity, joy, beauty, and community. Folding together conversations and collaborations with crip community, my work centres and amplifies the tender words of queer femmes of colour whose expansive generosity and kindness lead the Disability Justice movement. Through tenacious vulnerability, crip storytelling makes visible our struggles and hopes while holding space for kinship and connection.

Utilizing the framework of performance autoethnography, my practice moves “back and forth between the personal and the political, the biographical and the historical”⁴ to stimulate collective political imagination. Weaving together rituals of care, rest, and sustainability with printmaking, fabrication, 3D modelling, textiles, installation, and photography, my transdisciplinary research practice is activated by and for crip community. Through the alchemy of care and community, roots spread slowly, patiently, deeply. Planted in love⁵ and growing closer through the expansive and intertwined networks of our kinship.

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¹ Aurora Levins Morales, Aurora Levins Morales (blog),  http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/
²  This work is a joyful love letter to Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory. dream beyond the wounds “is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honoured, but first made visible.” Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Topical Cream (website), April 1, 2022, https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/.
³ Crip is a reclamation of language. It is a way of holding space for one another, not to diminish the individual experience of disability but rather to acknowledge the disabling socio-economic forces that impact a bodymind’s capacity to authentically thrive.
⁴ Norman Denzin, Performance Autoethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 47.
⁵ Shayda Kafai, Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. 2021), 59.