Trajectories, a blog of my practice

My disability has taught me that the more people I encounter, the more my nervous system must respond. While not everyone has my PDA Autistic nervous system, I do believe it’s a spectrum and we all exist on a scale of nervous system sensitivity. I believe we’re becoming more sensitive as a species, and our trauma and perceived traumas are being passed down to next generations.

The pain of seeing someone so clearly but not soon enough for all your hopes to make it out of the canyons that form between intention and action, trespass and forgiveness, is so palpable to me right now it's a gum my jaws roll around all night.

The brown is almost overwhelming this time of year but there is also the blue that is only really seen in the summer in Vancouver. The shoulder season in New England is crunchy and full of sticks that will poke your eye out if you aren’t looking. It is dry and wet at the same time, a crackling, squelching affair depending on where you step. The contradiction of it all is very New England.

We aren’t responsible for being what others want. We are responsible for knowing ourselves, for holding ourselves accountable to the standards and values we claim to uphold. Figuring out when our feelings belong to us, and when they are being projected onto us by others is such an important lesson for kids and it does not get taught explicitly enough.

My work was featured in Colasal on Friday! Editor Kate Mothes, also creator of Young Space, reached out last week and asked for images and permission to share, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. The write up that Jackie Andres did was thoughtful, in depth, yet concise enough to let the work really be the center of the article.

But I realized that I was done appealing and worrying how the work looked. It’s funny that it happened in my art before it happened in my skin. It would be another two years before I cut my hair off and fully unmasked physically. I havent been able to disconnect myself from my studio trajectory since I began my Low Supply body of work.

I have come to the conclusion that the role white women have played for white men in history is to be a validation vessel for the toxic masculinity and problematic primal thoughts and behaviors of men. We are decorative porcelain vases standing by to hold all of the emotions men cannot process or take responsibility for, all of the mental load that makes them feel badly about themselves, inadequate, or failures.

Right now, I’m busy putting my energy into thousands of horacruxes I call art. It’s so far the only plan for dealing with death that has ever made any sense to me and ultimately the one I think is most human. I will live on in my objects the way people have for centuries before we gained the ability to extend our bodies. I will focus on my time here, not my time after, because I have seen that those who focus on the afterlife have a real knack for ignoring the horrors they are complicit in during this life. 

We often see divergence as a challenge or threat, but sometimes it is simply disability or difference that makes us shift trajectories. I cannot build Lego sets because my brain cannot rotate images and so I make many fundamental mistakes while trying to follow the diagram instructions. This leads to frustration for me and my son. I started doing Lego work in a different way because I couldn’t use the product the way it was intended to be used.

I will explain art is not meant to be a decoration, but rather a query we are meant to respond to. Bad art leaves us unsure how to respond, feeling like we are somehow less knowledgeable after viewing. Good art reveals something to us, generating a response that feels like we have been invited to something. Children should learn when they are being manipulated and when they are being invited. Art education does that.

Creating an object that is tied to a memory is a way of using the object as an external hard drive. The memory and energy is transferred to the object, giving it meaning and power not only to the maker but to others as well. People can tell when objects have mattered to others. We need to again cultivate this sense that capitalism has tried to kill.

As an elementary aged child I was acutely aware that what people saw shifted how they responded or reacted and if you were able to also shift yourself-how you looked or behaved in anticipation of this perception- you could then have some manner of control over how you lived in other people’s heads. These car window experiments provided my brain with so much data about humanity that I had a lot to work with by the time I was a preteen really getting attention from men.

I think making art right now is very difficult for many because we have tied art to capitalism in a way that binds the artists to seeking appeal instead of discourse. At a time when so many are suffering and world order seems balanced on a precipice inhabited by lunatic villiain-aires, how can one justify making pretty things without function that cost a lot of money?

Everything is connected unless you choose to try to be the one who casts and control the net, thus removing yourself from connection. We need more people on the net strengthening connections and more people who see the whole net, not more vying to control it.

I’ve fully come to accept that my thinking is unique and mine and won’t appeal to all. I’m ok being smarter than others now. But I am still seeking my peers, my real intellectual cohort, the ones who want to dig in to ‘Old Mistresses; Woman, Art, and Ideology’ like I am. It’s strange to reach 44 and feel like I’ve diminished my own intellect for others comfort my whole life and am now at a point where what I think can no longer be contained.

Since I started making art about myself and my difficulties breast feeding, I have incorporated vulnerability as one of my mediums and I use it like echolocation, like a beacon, like a lighthouse, so others know it’s ok to be just as they are.

This is a searing inditement of how long Black Americans have been dancing for white approval and that it’s time to stop and dance for themselves. Serena Williams doing the Crip Walk without smiling at us was icing on a an absolute stone cold serve to the White America that almost let her, and so many black mothers like her, die in child birth in my eyes. So well done.

When I had kids and saw myself reflected in them and then in their diagnoses, it was nothing short of identity breaking. I was almost coping after I had my son but that really meant heavily masking and putting too much stress on him as a toddler to maintain the illusion, and when my daughter came it just about broke me.

I think we should base our labels off how reliant an autistic individual is. We could say “Independent Autistic” for those of us currently classified as Level 1. Then it could be “Reliant on Support Autistic” (you could even add what type of support), and “Vitally or medically supported Autistic.”

t’s impossible for me to unravel unmasking my neurodivergence from my parenting and the identity shift that followed. It was one ball of yarn. Now that it’s unravelled, I see so many connections between my experience and whats happening in the world today. The world needs a deep unmasking right now.