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ABOUT /
BODY OF WORK/
My experience as an artist, curator, circle facilitator, community organizer, creative placemaking strategist, cultural & environmental activist, cross-cultural advocate, conflict resolution student, ceremonial artist & apprentice, and wilderness communion guide have diversified my ability to understand and creatively respond to the needs of the times, in service to restoring relational wisdom.
Major former works have taken shape as a collection of large-scale portraits of Indigenous Wisdomkeepers, with their inter-tribal wisdom stories and emphasizing art sale reciprocity to their local regenerative initiatives. The People's Mural Project gathered the under-heard narratives of culturally and environmentally siloed communities to bring awareness, belonging, and advocacy to greater community power and local tourism for support and healing engagement.
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LIVING IN THE WILD /
For the last eight years, I have been living in wild lands. To contemporary understanding, this looks like camping within public wilderness areas. To the primordial mind, this is a deep apprenticeship with the diverse intelligence of the natural world, experimenting with immersion as a way to remember a more ancestral way of being. I became alive in ways that domestication did not offer. My senses - both inner and outer - became cultivated, untamed, and honed. I began to feel held in something that our contemporary culture doesn't have context for, yet Indigenous and earth-communing peoples not only understand but renew in their way of life. This commitment and practice of lifeway has opened up a relational reality that prepares me to articulate the purpose and depths of this journey.
There is another dimension to this way of life that I have studied in regards to land privatization and even public lands. To "live in the wild" for me has also been exploration of what it can truly feel like for my body, belonging, and identity to settle into earth has my primordial home. Closer to an ancestral relating with place. Living outside of mortgage, rent, land taxation, and other economic bondages that may not only ask to be complicit to capitalistic exponential cycles, but in someways dams or prevents our inherent somatic knowing of home. I found that I could never truly settle in my nervous system because if I didn't keep up with economic participation, I could have my home taken from me. I wanted to explore what it would feel like to live outside of this contemporary norm, and show my body, mind, and being how to truly find home, rest, protection, and support from the wild.
ON BEING NON-INDIGENOUS /
Being a non-Indigenous person and raised in a postcolonial mindset, value system, and sense of identity, feels like a significant piece in this journey and way of life. Because although I was not brought up to understand existence from a more Indigenous and interconnected worldview, I have slowly, gently, and with honesty began to remember and heal my colonial conditioning over many years. And the path will still continue until I am an old woman, and into my next lives.
This feels like where the work truly lives; for each to come home to the intelligence of the earth and find our right place in this belonging, together. I know that when I do this, I heal the belonging and connection of my lineage. That although colonization has severed my conscious knowing of my earth-relating ancestry, I honor them by reclaiming and relearning in this lifetime, tending to the ones that will come after me.
And that although I may not be living in the lands where my ancestors' bones have been buried for a time beyond mind, I can trust that the lands that call me to place my feet and heart, that I have sacred work, listening, and responsibility with them in a far greater purpose than I understand during these times of great healing.
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