WE GAVE YEAR opened at Cival Collective during Gallery Night Milwaukee, January 19 2024.
WE GAVE YEAR is a yearlong project I began last January (2023-2024) when thinking about ancestral healing, and how can we feel at home while struggling with being born on stolen land, severed from land based ways of being through colonization and white supremacy, disconnected from the old ways and old world.
One arm of this project was making a personal commitment for one year to stepping into a role as educator; teaching small groups of interested individuals about the folk ways of old europe, how our regional cultures have been lost to whiteness and how we can weave this creative and conscious way of being into our lives where we live now (see:). The other arm of this project was this series of paintings, drawings, experimental photographs, and sculpted objects; each season showing up to my studio and devoting myself to telling these stories using a visual language.
In the introduction to the book “The Nordic Animist Year” by historian Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, he writes of an Iron Age runestone in southern Sweden which is inscribed with the words “Hathuwolafuz Gave Year”. To ‘give year’ was a beautiful way of describing this person’s deep connection to the world around them, and the active responsibility they felt toward the land over the course of a year. For animists, a year is more than the passing of time. A year of seasonal change is foundational to life, and we all come from cultures that honored place, cycles of life and death, and gratitude for the part we play in it. People as a part of nature (not separate from it) has been somewhat lost in modernity, and many of us have been severed from the practice of seasonal rituals which in essence give back to the earth. During this time of climate crisis, of capitalist greed and white supremacy, I have channeled this grief into an ongoing series in mixed media that explore ancestral practices of place and how that can teach us ways to bridge the gap, reduce harm, and heal.
Featured Work:
False Face cyanotyped onto fabriano using the Midsommar sun at 12:00 noon with flower essence water. Framed 24x17.5”. 1 of a kind. 2023
Hand of Glory cyanotyped onto fabriano using the Midsommar sun at 12:00 noon with flower essence water. Framed 24x17.5”. 1 of a kind. 2023 SOLD
May Queen cyanotyped onto fabriano using the Midsommar sun at 12:00 noon with flower essence water. Framed 24x17.5”. 1 of a kind. 2023
Portal cyanotyped onto fabriano using the Midsommar sun at 12:00 noon with flower essence water. Framed 24x17.5”. 1 of a kind. 2023
Lussi Procession acrylic on canvas,30x40” 2023
Marzanna acrylic on canvas,30x40” 2023
Bonfire Night acrylic on canvas,30x40” 2023
Verdant Days acrylic on canvas,30x40” 2023
Protection 1 Beeswax, ash and honey locust wood, Hawthorne branch. Life sized. 2023.
Installation & Opening
