Hi Everyone!

I want to share ideas surrounding a work I’ve made recently, what I’ve been up to, & what’s to come.

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I just finished up a piece that took 2 years of chewing bread to make. It’s titled “Token of A Lost World” and references a story I grew up with describing the moment my mom decided to be with my dad.

My mom sold all of her belongings and moved to Ukraine to be a Christian missionary. While she was there, she met my dad (who was her friend’s English translator), and they started dating.

One day, while my mom and dad were living in Ukraine, she heard a knock on the door at her apartment. Two men showed up claiming to be police and were there to confiscate my mom for being in the country illegally (even though she had a legal visa). My dad pointed out that they were not in uniform, and as they were trying to take my mom, he got into a fist fight with them and was sent to jail. While locked up, they gave him a portion of bread every day. One day, he chewed a small piece of bread and formed it into a heart-shaped pendant with a cross stamped into it and gifted it to my mom. She knew from that point that he was the person she would marry.

I grew up hearing this story and thought it was fiction, until after my mom passed, I found this pendant in a secret compartment of her jewelry box. This small token of love was held in that box for over 15 years.

While I was making that piece, I was thinking about that act of love, physically growing to create basket-worlds. The work was made to model this growth, showing the piece at different stages of its development. If you know me, you know I love SCULPTURES that model SYSTEMS. I always loved looking at diagrams & maps from archeology or earth systems science, of time-stamped objects, weather, deposition, etc., all layered with one another.

Another thing I was thinking about with this work was its materiality. The layers of soil/dirt at the tops of each basket are made of blood meal and activated charcoal, modeling Chernozem, the Ukrainian black soil, said to be so dark from its history of Holodomor. Holodomor was a genocide from a man-made wheat famine during WWII under Stalin’s rule, killing more than 3.5 million Ukrainian people. Now, as the Russo-Ukrainian war has heightened, Chernozem has been stolen and sold in stores across Russia. It’s difficult to sit with the layers of extraction that have been instigated by one person in power, stealing everything from soil to orphaned children from Ukraine.

[deep breath]

As I have thought about the cultural stories and symbols that have endured centuries, living within craft traditions, many of them center love. As Maya Angelou once said, “Love liberates”, knowing the structural impact of that force. In my own life, I have felt that to be true.

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While I was working on this project, I was also reading Portalmania, a collection of short stories where portals come in different forms. Sometimes, a portal is a human transforming, sometimes it’s a dark, ripe-smelling hole that appears in the pavement, and sometimes it’s an inaccessible space people dream about escaping to.

I recently went through past-life regression therapy, where I was in a deep meditative state for 1.5 hrs doing very, very big healing work. I am still coming out of it, but in a lot of ways, I feel like I am becoming a portal (and kind of becoming Jim Carrey in his enlightenment era), and it’s restructuring my physiology to my core! It’s really hard to describe without sounding CRAZY, but odd physical symptoms have come with it, too. I won’t share much more, but I’m down to talk about it with anyone curious!

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In other news, I was accepted to participate in the MDW Summit in Detroit with a stipend covering my stay! This summit is a “gathering of the artists who run artist-run projects, platforms, and spaces from across the Midwest, coming together to share boundary-pushing work, connect with other artist organizers, and weave some midwestern cultural ecology.” I will be there to spread the word about UP & UP Kite Show, and I hope to make some friends, too! :)

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speaking of friends… mhmmm *clears throat

ATTENTION RICHMOND FRIENDS! I will be visiting Richmond, VA, December 18th - 22nd. Let’s link up! This may be the last time I visit for a while.

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Here is a fun online “game” I will leave everyone with https://sandspiel.club/#

Take care!

christina