For nine days this February 2020 I was accepted at an art residency at Wellspring House in Ashfield, MA. It was a time of reflection, experimentation, connecting with other artists and writers, and taking stock of where I want to go next with my work. A time that I am even more grateful for since the onset of Covid-19. I worked on an essay about making art and writing as a chronically ill disabled artist, catalogued and organized new project ideas, completed more charcoal drawings, experimented with inks and water-soluble wax pastels, and started a new body of work that I’m currently calling Out of Sync.
Out of Sync will be focused on my personal experiences chronic illness, trauma and disability, which increasingly shape my artistic work. Out of Sync is a reference to Crip time, to the ways that sick and disabled bodyminds are often unable to conform with mainstream society’s standards of time. (Note: Crip is a reclaimed slur used by some in the disability community as a word of empowerment; crip being short for cr*pple.) Crip time is slow time; crip time is one word, one sentence at a time, and not paragraphs or pages at a time. Crip time is sleeping in not because you want to but because you have to, because you have no choice; you will be completely unable to function if you don’t, because the exhausting toll of chronic pain, chronic fatigue, chronic insomnia and mental health conditions is not something that can be “just pushed through”.
Fatigue #1 (Body Map) | 2020 | 8.5’’ x 11’’ | Bonfire charcoal and pastels on paper | Day 2 of my Wellspring House residency
Crip time is sunset becoming sunrise and sunrise becoming sunset, because it is 6am and you are still unable to sleep, and you won’t wake up until 3pm later that day as a result. Crip time is drawing an eighth, a sixteenth, a hundredth of a page at a time, as pain and fatigue allows. Crip time is working in small scale, even though I long to work big, because that is what my space and body can accommodate right now. Crip time is an act of resistance, of rebelling against the capitalist idea that to have worth and value in (Western) society, you must live in a bodymind that is able to work and be productive in its rigid ideas of what kinds of work have value. Crip time is learning to embrace and value my bodymind even if it can’t perform capitalist ideas of productivity.
Productivity Anxiety Management #2 | 2020 | 9’’ x 12’’ | Fireplace charcoal on paper (charcoal from fireplace at Wellspring House, Ashfield, MA) | Day 4 of my Wellspring House residency
