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Artist Statement

In a world where many die before their time, in this climate catastrophe, in this collapsing capitalocene, I perform the grief web. I gather discarded materials from city streets — clothes, bedclothes, shoes, boxes, bags — and weave them into boundary places, into trees, into public parks, into my body and other bodies. Through these ephemeral site-specific installations, I transform what has been abandoned into precious intricate landscapes, reliquaries for roadkilled animals, resting places made of branches and braids and bedsheets. This making is embodied poetry and mourning ritual. In the tradition of the memorial t-shirts people in my neighborhood make for our dead, I create shirt-poems, writing my grief in tangles of inarticulacy: fragments of poetry, maps, sketches, rhizomes, roots, magpies, vultures. On the inside, against my skin, I write the names of kin whose deaths shape my life: family (blood, chosen, given, found), nonhuman people groups (species) extinct in Turtle Island/North America, childhood friends, people murdered by the police, all neighbors who die before their time. Wearing this poem, I go into the forest and tear my shirt in grief, weaving its threads into my hair, the trees, mud, and moss. I record these rituals and present them in video fragments intermixed with sound recordings of local birds (live sounds) and extinct birds (ghost sounds). These birds, as well as the trees, mud, wind, and rain are my co-artists. We mark each other, tearing, scratching, staining, composing and decomposing each other. Following Cecilia Vicuña, Anna Tsing, Thom Van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Donna Haraway, we become kin in interdependent multispecies worlds. Following magpies, who mourn their dead, we perform funerals for roadkill. Following vultures, who recycle corpses, we shape our lives around the deaths of others, and transform death into precarious life. Entangled, we perform precarious life for our dead and dying kin.

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