Staying Troubled
kelly drumright (they/them)
Listen to the Essay:
Image Description (above): Photograph of an aged cedar fence with a canvas painted in blue and red oils with a river of navy roving yarn interspersed with copper wire, glass beads, and various grasses and flowers meanders diagonally across. In the lower left quadrant is a bright red postcard from The Red Nation with white gothic-style text that reads "Decolonization or Extinction" and in dark red above "#TheRedDeal."
Image Description: Photograph of an aged cedar fence with a canvas painted in dripping layers of black, white, blue, and purple with scattered delphinium and hydrangea blossoms features a central ring of jagged metal adorned with plastic beads. Navy roving wool, iridescent beads, and grass seeds cascade from an opening in bottom of the metal "fence." In the canvas's center is a postcard mailer from Critical Resistance that depicts a mural with a feminine face and a daisy as an earring and reads "Toward Liberation!"
I can’t remember the exact time when I pivoted toward foraged and repurposed materials, but I do remember why: a bone-deep realization that there’s no “away” to throw anything to. After many years of ongoing study of anti-racist and anti-colonial frameworks and movements, a core teaching of interconnectedness landed viscerally and has since unfurled in my art and mutual aid practices. Aspirationally, I always want to be troubling whiteness and settler-ness, those impulses that have me sub/consciously oriented towards anthropocentrism, disposability, individuality, novelty, purity, and urgency in myriad ways. “Staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway shoutout) for me means an ongoing commitment to learning from, materially supporting, and following the lead of the beings most negatively impacted by the oppressive systems from which I benefit.
And then there’s the constant struggle to strike a balance between A) shutting the fuck up about the things I’m doing (wary of performative activism and the surveillance State) and B) speaking/stepping the fuck up as necessary (Black Lives Matter! Free Palestine! Land Back! Being queer/trans is cool, actually!). I keep coming back to James Baldwin’s wisdom: “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
The pieces included here center on postcards mailed by two incredible organizations that I myself support and encourage others to as well: The Red Nation and Critical Resistance. The postcards are displayed alongside beads, dried botanicals, paint, paper, roving yarn, scrap metal, silk thread, and wire on canvas.
"Decolonization or Extinction" includes a postcard by The Red Nation (therednation.org), an indigenous media organization that publishes a phenomenal podcast in addition to print titles.
"Towards Liberation" includes a postcard from Critical Resistance (criticalresistance.org), an organization working to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex.
I imagine folks might not give mailers like these a second thought (*skims postcard* “That’s neat. This can be recycled, right?”). Or, if I’m being optimistic, maybe they end up as talismans on someone’s fridge or altar. Rather than dispose of these movement ephemera, I wanted to honor and archive these artistic objects while embracing my particular flavor of multimedia chaos.