When I close my eyes, I see other worlds. I see environmental havens, vast forests and expansive coral reefs. Some days, I see hellish dystopias, techno-feudal societies and a planet wrecked by nuclear bombs. When my eyes are open, I see a world unable to imagine alternative paths. I see a world addicted to colonialism, extraction, and profit. What does it mean to imagine something new, to build worlds, to restructure meaning, and to offer an alternative path?
A new land ethic must come first—an anticolonial way of living that extends the web of relations to all people. When I say people, I refer to plants, animals, rivers, mountains, stars, and the earth itself. I want to listen to the stories of the people that I was conditioned to disregard. I want to share those stories—bizarre untranslatable stories that refuse a single medium and instead unfold over and over again through text, time, space, body, and book.
When telling stories, my making keeps me curious. My curiosity has encouraged experimentations with weaving, printmaking, animation, fiction, poetry, performance, sound, woodworking, ceramics, and bookmaking. My mediums drift into and out of one another throughout the storytelling process, each medium altering the meaning of another. By translating across mediums and species, I challenge the limitations of language and invite contradictions and peculiarities.
I’ve recently been occupied by The Water Drop—a world suspended above The River of time where turtles can become messiahs and spiders can destroy societies. Long ago, the world of The Water Drop was immortalized in text, thus spawning cultural and artistic traditions inspired by this mysterious realm’s mythologies. The creations of The Water Drop, like a river and its tributaries, flow, branch, and recombine as they rush into the ocean of our reality, until one can no longer determine where the truth of one world ends and the other begins.
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
-Watson
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