Let’s get personal
So much of our work is about relationships. The majority of our members are related and if not by blood, they are chosen families with long-time roots and a commitment to each other.
This winter’s trip was entitled the ‘homegoing’. for this trip we decided to take half the members to California to reconnect develop and explore our relationships with family and origin. This trip is wonderfully mystic. We visited the aunties. Childhood homes, grandparents, childhood friends. We are were also brand new, we explored, played, and skated through places we loved, new places, and places we learned, were hurt and fumbled through in our early years.
When most of the work you do is an acute examination of proportions and relationships it’s important to dig into that on a personal intimate level…and it’s not always easy to do this work. We world build in our art as a way of escape as well as find inspiration…but these relationships require us to do the grounding part and that’s not always easy. This trip was all that stuff.
We threw bones with Mama and grandma…maybe graduating to the adult table.
We listened to love stories. We ran from drama and tried to let the difficult people be who they are but we adjusted our proximity by staying further away and not adding to that narrative…aka adjusting our proportions, a method heavily relied upon in collage and arrangement work.
We have been on an archiving project for the past few years. It shows up in our work from time to time…kinda low key, but it’s generally there. On this trip we digitized VHS tapes, and boxes of family photos…but mostly we listened to love stories.
We slept, sunbathed, tried on new characters, we drew, photographed, cooked, tufted, watched hummingbirds, Signed contracts, rejected contracts, partnered with some fly partners on some dope projects…soon come.
We are watering and loving up on ourselves so that we can bust out some nifty flowers once our roots get stronger.
What are y’all doing to take care of yer selves?
What’s yer love story?