“We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss, and we are called to respond. [...]

We howl in the dark for the loss that surrounds us now, and for all that is coming.”

— Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018), “In the Shadow of All This Death.”

​

“You made me question everything cuz you ain’t live life.”

— Kieran “KSmigz” Carlson (2001-2022), “Long Live 52.”

​

The grief web project is an attempt to respond to death. To become response-able — responsible and able to respond — within the deathzone: where the living and the dying meet, where we live on after they die, where their deaths make our lives possible. I grieve for all beings who have been made ungrievable, for all who die before their time, for all our dead and dying kin and kin of kin. In particular, I mourn for childhood friends who have been killed in my neighborhood, for species made extinct by climate change and capitalism, for my three grandmothers and all my ancestors, for roadkilled animals, and for every being killed by those two great American weapons: the car and the gun.

​

To create grief webs, I gather discarded materials from Seattle’s streets and transform them into ephemeral site-specific memorials. I make memorial shirt-poems covered the names, images, and words of dead kin, which I tear open and weave into branches, mud, and my hair. My work draws from the mourning practices of my community, the Excelsior District, which include memorial t-shirts, candlelight vigils, protests, roadside memorials, ancestor rituals, funeral liturgies, church services, rap, and spoken word. I also draw from the mourning practices of nonhuman animals and multispecies communities, especially magpie rituals, the song of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, and vulture funerals in Asia. Joining them, I become one thread within an interdependent web of vulnerable creatures — entangled, ephemeral, embodied, emplaced. Through mourning rituals and storytelling, we practice precarious life in the shadow of death.

​

​

Multimedia installation. Materials found in streets, alleys, and gutters within two miles of the SPAC Gallery, including clothing, branches, blankets, bags, sheets, twigs, petals, seeds, a hammock, a pillowcase, gloves, masks.

​

Exhibited in the SPAC Gallery as a part of the group show Resid[u]e in April 2023. 

​