the letter tree
gallery show,
Toronto, Canada,
2009
THE LETTER TREE
artist statement (2009)
a language is landscape
is everything that
the body has come to believe about speaking.
We generally accept that a landscape is constantly changing;
shape-shifting through conversations between seasons and time and tides and space,
so why not then the character of that conversation?
Of communication itself?
As an educator in the public school system, I sometimes find it difficult to teach about language in a way that celebrates words as entities that are atoms of oral stories and therefore fluid... changeable... a product and medium of individual experience.
As an artist who believes that drawing is a part of language
and that marks on paper are as letters are to words...
I find it difficult not to.
When we teach and learn the definitions of words as singular entities – disconnected from the history of alphabets and languages and as products of the societies they evolved in – we infer that the meaning currently attached to them and the potential of their application in communication is static:
true false
good bad
straight gay
boy girl
We suggest that one can be either one or the other or no-thing at all.
I would argue that in doing so, we are complicit in perpetuating rigid binaries where there could be continuums... of condoning the establishment of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in each new generation.
Both art making and teaching share the potential to be transformative political acts. They are opportunities to acknowledge and engage in what should be a collective responsibility for facilitating positive social change; opportunities to challenge the things that societal hierarchies tell us are important and valid and “true”.
Words can mean more than one thing at the same time, and
all things are more than
the names we call words.
![to remember [repeat]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf99c8a1db5b4000100f9ef/1561401322409-O9P7KY3UT0R065W6SPHN/david+series+2.jpg)
given sex
gallery show,
Toronto, Canada,
2006
GIVEN SEX
artist statement (2006)
In storytelling, we must be accountable to our multiple selves: the truth of our hybridism. By owning our multiplicity and then choosing to take the time to describe those aspects of our experiences that are most important to us, we are making a political statement. We are challenging what societal hierarchies tell us should be important, and valid,
and “true”. [1]
We are renaming what we have been told is our shame.
I am engaged in an ongoing inquiry as to how experiences of physical violation may affect one’s ability to self-define, and equally, how any attempt by society to define, label, or box an individual (“girl”, “lesbian”, “butch”, “femme”, “creative vs. logical”, etc.) can be experienced as yet another confinement.
In other words; labels, which confine, recall the original experience of violation and compound it.
Words can mean more than one thing at the same time;
My drawings are stories told through the many meanings that my body remembers.
The act of drawing heightens my awareness of my own physicality. The experience is one that I now consider to be more performative than product-oriented in nature. I feel most like I am actively honouring my relationship to my experiences when I can feel the emotional root of the subject matter informing the act of creation, making it direct and kinetic.
I know this connection most consistently and profoundly through the simple act of making marks on paper.
[1] with special thanks to the audrey lorde writing group.
