Journal
Aug 11 2024
One thing that has become very clear and important to me, that I haven't been able to put into words before, is my usage of darkness and light in my work. The idea of darkness being evil and light being good is so prevalent in culture, art, and in the very lanugage we speak. They have been completely synonymous for hundreds of years. Black, darkness, evil, opressive. Not only is this a covert tool of racism embedded in language, but it is just plain wrong.
Black is comfort. A dark room. Blackness behind your eyes as you sleep. A black sky with all the animals underneath it. Black is the safety of being unseen. It's home. It's luxury. Dark fur and dark eyes. Black is the most important color in my work and the most important part of my message.
Light, on the other hand, is the opposite of comfort. It is exposure. Disorienting brightness. Being seen by the predator. White is rare because it doesn't last long. A death sentence. An affront to the senses. White is not the color humans think it is.
For too many years, darkness has symbolized death, evil, and a force to be challenged. In reality, it is the color of so many good things that the bad pales in comparison. This is not to say that white is a bad color. There are no bad colors, only bad ideas that affect the real world. There are no bad apearances at all. Human ideas are heavily dictated by visuals, and then these ideas are applied back to the visuals they are frightened of. Ugliness is not a term that is applied in the natural world. It was made up. Darkness, as something bad, is the same.
Most will not connect with my art for this reason. They won't understand it, not until they give up the restrictive ideas about darkness, beauty, ugliness, uniformity, purity, that poisons them through words. They must look and not be afraid. They must look at what is frightening and imagine they are that frightening thing. There is nothing about appearance that indicates evil or good. If they could abandon the power words have over them, they might find all of them beautiful.
Poetry
Squirrel
When a body lies still and cooling,
does it dream? Or does it wait
for gossamer angel wings to hum like hymns
and land in families on its fur.
A thousand compact eyes shimmer.
Is it relieved? Its muscles are frozen,
trapped in the cradle of gravity.
The angels work selflessly. Gentle mouths
kiss away at soft tissue and
warm the body in their motion,
lapping like waves under
the skin where they crawl.
Is it grateful? It sighs into the dirt,
stomach caving and ribs folding like chairs
inside the softness of its fur–a blanket–
the final comfort that covers an empty body.
When it is no longer a body,
when it melts like sugar water into the grass,
will it remember this?
The angels depart, singing.
Delicate ivory rests in the earth.