Ganute!

I was birthed by an artist.

 

My mother made it a point to foster the creative spark I was born with at an early age. Her devotion to her own art inspired mine. She was one of my first introductions to what rebellion could look like, and as a female-bodied artist I believe it was intrinsic to her very being. Hers was not the kind of rebellion recorded in books or marked by a day on the calendar, but rather the kind that springs from necessity, inter-generational pain, ancestral time-walking, and an unshakeable & agonizing awareness of yet-to-be-dreamed possibilities. 

 

She loved to re-purpose where and when she could. I regularly witnessed her walk into thrift stores and yard sales, pick something up, hold it as if to channel its deep desire to transform, and then look up at me and say "I could make [xyz] with this!" Her eyes saw art everywhere, from fishbones freshly cast like divination stones by the ocean tide to feathers lightly resting as if left on purpose by some great winged creature, just for her. 

 

My own journey as a queer, indigenous-hybrid artist is marked by evolution, iteration, and longing. 

 

Beading, instrument crafting, guiding, writing, mothering and teaching are a few of the art forms that wield my life. Each vein, an expression of my creative participation, is imbued with the magik of deep-time conversations between myself and my multi-specied ancestors, place-based intimacy with the lands that grew me and the lands that currently hold me, and ecological inspirations that spring from the many bodies that shape not only the land but also my heart - from deer to flicker, mountain lion to coyote, yarrow to swallowtail butterfly, and on. 

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For me, art is ceremony!

 

Ceremony that invokes the anarchy of wonder. The kind of ceremony that moves coyote across the land, sniffing the ground and yipping at the moon. The ceremony of being. A ceremony of relations; of living and dying and living again. 

 

I spent years challenging social normativities and resisting paradigms dressed up in words like colonization, industrialization, patriarchy, imperialism and more, only to feel myself called back, over and over again, to my mystic & artistic roots. These days I don't believe much in the contemporary currents of activism, but I do believe in the alchemy of art & it's innate ability to transform the world.

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Art as deep listening.

Art as an honoring of ancestral lines.

Art as a bridging of the seen & unseen worlds. 

Art as birthing the ineffable.

Art as a pathway to engage the largest conversation to be had with the world. 

Art as a medium for expanded & altered states of consciousness. 

Art as a sanctifying of the ordinary & an invocation of the sacred.

Art as a disturbing & connective force. 

Art as an invocation of possibility. 

Art as a becoming-with the world. 

Art as spell-casting & conjuring. 

Art as an expression of the multiplicitous. 

Art as an instigation of rebellion, mutation, resiliency, hybridity, and disruption. 

Art as an expression of love for the great mystery of being alive.

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As an artist, mystic & guide, my intent is to evoke the wisdom of another's wide-stretched & deep-rooted knowing; their participatory aliveness growing out of the relational assemblage of their richly entangled life. Whether that be through beading, instrument crafting, guiding, writing, teaching or mothering. This is the living prayer of my life. 

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I was birthed by an artist. But, then again, weren't we all? Are we not all children of the Earth and stars?