During my artist’s residency at the Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, Wisconsin) in summer 2019, I was meant to be writing, but my computer stopped working. In the days (then weeks) before I could catch a three-hour ride into the city to the nearest electronics repair shop, I constructed an altar and tapestry, reinscribing/reiterating a series of photographs of my grandmother Jaswant when she was a young mother, recently immigrated to Mombasa, Kenya. In the photographs, her nervous hands became a punctum, a sudden bend in the universe of our intertwined histories. Through isolating, tracing, enlarging the scale, iterating in charcoal, ink, paper, cotton, threads, and eventually writing, a body of work began to form. I consier the altar and tapestry installed at the Woolen Mill Gallery (Reedsburg, Wisconsin) as branches of a larger project in performance and memoir. Another element of this project, what I was meant to be writing, is an in-process book-length lyric essay, started in 2017. Excerpts of this lyric essay appear in O BOD and rivulet.
The tapestry and altar were presented at the Woolen Mill Gallery, alongside work by artists Jagdeep Raina, Alexander Hanson, and Tory Tepp.
Gallery wall text below:
Please email me for permission to duplicate or re-use these images.