In Praise of Voice Notes and Penguin Pebbling (part of Mourning Microcosmmutes), 2023

Digital photographs laser printed on cotton canvas, embroidery, looped digital video (silent)

WORK STATEMENT

In Praise of Voice Notes and Penguin Pebbling is a part of Mourning Microcosmmutes, a multi-phase, multi-media project featuring photographs, embroidery, and digital video. Both documenting the various paths and barriers that shape my domestic atmosphere as an ambulatory wheelchair user and disabled “shielder” this series also highlights the access intimacy within qrip careships as represented through the life-sustaining exchange of mobile phone voice notes. 

For other disabled shielders, artists and otherwise like myself, the pandemic boldly persists while the scope of our social geography progressively decreases, leaving the walls and roofs of our homesteads and headquarters the only “protected” places for us to exist, and even then we were not always safe.

For this series, I am focussing on the transoms, portals, and points of transition I pass through dozens of times a day within or adjacent to my home. As an autistic creator, there are patterns, visual and ambient rhythms, and other aesthetic observations that could only come from my embodiment of hypervigilance and sensory processing. I want to share these micro minutiae as I experience them. 

My daily commutes are anything from the trip between a telephone doctor’s appointment and setting up my tube feeds on a lunch break;  the colleagues I see at specific times of day are the birds and bunnies that frequent my backyard; the distance calculations and route adjustments I make are influenced by the weather, the quality of sunlight, pain or fatigue levels, dizziness, time of day in relation to medication doses, verbal acuity or brain fog, mobility, and more. 

The term ‘micro’ within this project has a two-fold implication. Both referring to the relative size of my “commute”; as well as the zoomed-in, microscopic composition of the images and clips. I am especially interested in capturing the missable, commonplace, or unremarkable elements that make up my at-home atmosphere. 

I want to honour this space that protects me from [some] harm while acknowledging that by being the only safe place for me to be, my home also limits my autonomy beyond its threshold. 

Myself and my qrip-kin (qrip = queer + crip) have lost whole groups, networks of loved ones. Not only to the virus and its complications, but to the evaporation of trust and the permeating grief that replaced the love, respect, or care we previously shared. Many of us do not know how we will recover from the injury of being thrown away, by everyone, except each other. 

The 4 voice notes included are lifted from conversations with other disabled shielders in my life, those for whom the only way we can be together is through the recorded exchange of our voices. The included photographs are of areas frequently watched or interacted with during voice note conversations. 

1. Damaged kitchen walls and cabinets from wheelchair fender benders. 
2. Damaged bathroom wall as a result of an autistic meltdown related to medical care. 
3. Stained glass window in back door where I birdwatch and report back. 
4. The lace curtain obscured front window across from where my tube feeds are set up and where one of my cats perches to peruse the neighbourhood.

**Penguin Pebbling is a little exchange between two people to show that they care and want to build a meaningful connection. For autistic people, giving little gifts spontaneously can be a meaningful way of communicating that you are thinking about someone and that you care. (https://www.autisticrealms.com/post/penguin-pebbling-an-autistic-love-language)

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice threads multiple disciplines and approaches together in an exploration of balance and intracorporeal groundedness as a Black, agender, disabled creator and creature. Sourced from documentation of my disabled domestic sphere, digital and tactile media (here, embroidery) coalesce to support a narrative process that allows and aims to make a space for grief to live openly. 

My work and practice trouble the compulsory in/visibility of marginalized bodies by peering into ways inherited grief is somaticized and how this somatization impacts our daily movements. My hope is that through creating and offering work which explores and cares for my own experiences of mourning, I can create a landscape for the audience to sit with and care for their own

nadyes / you come back, 2022

Bronze, shed moose and elk antlers, acrylic paint

WORK STATEMENT

Within nadyes / you come back, Logan MacDonald uses sculptural installation to lyrically fixate on the learning and communication that exists outside colonial norms of communication, and to consider how erasure that is imposed by colonial mechanism can be subverted. MacDonald incorporates bronze strategically as a symbolic signifier to reference the perpetuated colonial narratives and systems imposed on our landscapes and bodies – and the hierarchical ways in which we are expected to teach and learn. He employs these bronze pieces in a dismantled/fragmented state, to subvert their power – absorbing the structures as aides that help form tableaux that support new meanings, histories, perspectives, movements, conversations, teachings. nadyes / you come back is presented as a series of small arranged sculptural installations and imagery traced on the wall. Together they form a large coded assemblage, with each piece, in some way, gesturing to the embodiment of knowledge: how our bodies can learn and teach through movements, vibrations, bodily cues, and how these signals have the capacity to transmit and extend between generations. nadyes / you come back is an attempt to lyrically highlight how we are capable of communicating beyond colonial language, to illustrate how Indigenous, queer, and crip folks have and continue to strategize to communicate our knowledge, needs, desires. How we have lived within the colonial systems, but are able to communicate beyond these limits, to survive in a system designed to ensure our erasure. The shed antler incorporated into nadyes / you come back is an example of MacDonald’s conceptual approach, by incorporating this biological material to reference a part of an animal’s body that is speculated to help them sonically hear both mates and prey.

Text by Amanda Cashia.

Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023

Black milk crates, repurposed saris and dupattas, rope

WORK STATEMENT

This piece is a Manja (Panjabi day bed) formed out of crates and I use traditional Punjabi weaving techniques and scraps of old south asian fabrics to create this piece. Like I mentioned earlier, I come from an intergenerationally disabled and working class Panjabi family full of artists. My inheritance will never be wealth, instead it is all these brilliant crip rituals around hacking normative and inaccessible design and spaces to create ease and support. This piece emerges from the rituals of finding discrete spaces in factories, flea market change rooms, kitchen fridges, cleaning supply closets and back alleys, where there was always a milk crate you could sit on. If you were lucky enough, you might even have the option to use milk crates to lean on or prop yourself up on during your shift. I learned this poor and crip access hack from the working class and chronically ill Panjabi aunties in my life, and I would argue that the use of crates in this particular context allows it to be a mobility aid. I chose to use crates in the creation of this Manja to honour the ritual and access intimacy around this type of knowledge exchange that provides a mapping on how to create reprieve for ourselves in spaces that make our bodies ache and contwort. 

For more context on what Manjas are, within Panjabi culture, it is common to find Manjas in shared spaces that are both indoor and outdoor, and it is essentially a day bad or the Panjabi Version of a cot. Traditionally it is made with a simple wooden frame and the bedding is created by braiding and weaving colourful rope or textiles by hand. In this context, I will make it by using milk crates and scraps from old saris and dupattas. Within western architecture and design, I rarely find truly accessible space to rest, sit or lay down on in a way that feels collective and whole. However, in Panjabi culture, laying down and resting collectively is a major consideration that is designed into our public and private landscapes. Growing up, the Manja in my living room was the nexus of my crip family and it disrupted this idea that rest needed to be a private or isolated experience, and the presence of Manjas viscerally shifts the energy in a shared or public space. 

In thinking about my inherited rituals around using milk crates as a mobility aid in so many rough working conditions that further disabled me, and the brilliance of Panjabi Manjas. I am currently in the process of creating a Manja by bounding 6 crates together that each have a hand woven top. I re-imagine the Manja through the use of crates and my intention is for it to be both a collective mobility aid and tool for communal rest, especially in public and capitalist infrastructures that decentre those of us who need space to sit, lay, prop up and slow down. Weaving the tops of each crate is also a process of adornment that allows the hardness of the crate to feel more comfortable and joyful, especially with the use of south asian fabrics that are a range of colours and soft textures. I want this piece to feel like a love letter to all the working class and disabled aunties in my life. I also want this piece to be an invitation for folks to stim with all its textures and a space to slow down. Ultimately this Manjas models an otherwise, where kin can collectively rest and abundantly spill over.

a garland for patty, 2022

Laser-engraved Moriki Kozo, Oguni Kakishibugami, and Chiri Kozo tissue on heritage washi paper

WORK STATEMENT

An offering, a warm embrace, an invitation to dream.

The text in this work is inspired by Sins Invalid’s co-founder Patty Berne’s tender forward in Shayda Kafai’s Crip Kinship. I hold her/their words so close, like a comforting shawl weighing down and enrobing my bodymind in the expansive warmth of crip beauty. Shayda Kafai, Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), 11.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The stories we share with each other are transformative, planting seeds of resistance and radical tenderness while tending networks of kinship and care. My research-creation practice centres crip storytelling as queer alchemy. A critical tool in transforming intersecting oppressions into evidence of chronically ill, mad, d/Deaf, neurodivergent, sick and disabled ingenuity, joy, beauty, and community. Folding together conversations and collaborations with crip community, my work centres and amplifies the tender words of queer femmes of colour whose expansive generosity and kindness lead the Disability Justice movement. Through tenacious vulnerability, crip storytelling makes visible our struggles and hopes while holding space for kinship and connection.

Utilizing Norman Denzin’s framework of performance autoethnography, my practice moves “back and forth between the personal and the political, the biographical and the historical” to stimulate collective political imagination. Weaving together rituals of care, rest, and sustainability with printmaking, fabrication, 3D modelling, textiles, installation, and photography, my transdisciplinary research practice is activated by and for crip community. Through the alchemy of care and community, roots spread slowly, patiently, deeply. Planted in love and growing closer through the expansive and intertwined networks of our kinship.

Pillow Fight, 2019 – ongoing

Used pillowcases and used medical supplies.

WORK STATEMENT

Pillow Fight consists of pillowcases stained from use and filled with years worth of medical supplies from both the artist’s life and gifted by their friends and family. The pillowcases huddle together in a corner and their contents are obscured. This opacity redirects away from pathology toward the necessity of care networks and support systems. Pillow Fight is an ongoing collective portrait that visualizes interdependence and togetherness, growing in number of pillowcases as time and supplies accumulate and is newly composed upon each installation.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Informed by queer-crip experience, community, and culture, I work to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, and the commodification of rest. My interdisciplinary practice depicts the materiality of interdependence through used, found or accumulated objects, slow pacing, and through collaboration. Drawing from both sites of and barriers to care, rest, and togetherness, I argue that to celebrate diverse bodyminds requires an anti-capitalist reconfiguration of time and value. Bedding is one of my primary materials which allows me to explore the bed as a site of collectivity and protest, as well as redefine what is typically considered to count as “work”. Through juxtapositions of domestic, industrial and natural materials, such as diamond-plate flooring, coffee beans, and sweat stained memory foam, I address the incompatibility of our needs with societal values of self-reliance, “hard work” and individualism. These tensions ask us to embrace slowness as well as recognize and honor our needs which are too often suppressed, consciously or unconsciously, to conform to white supremacist ideals of urgency, perfectionism, professionalism, and endless productivity. While the work speaks to the expansiveness of the self, specifics regarding the body and identity often remain opaque. Negating the demand placed on marginalized groups to provide an explanation, proof or diagnosis, to reveal or obscure becomes a tactic in my practice as I navigate the politics of visibility, 24/7 society, and my own access needs as a chronically ill autistic trans person.

When We Felt Together (at Workman Arts), 2023

Felt

Visibly Mended, 2022

Vintage indigo dyed shawls, linen sheet, cotton thread.

“Sit Still” and “Look at Me,”  2022

2 chairs containing varioius objects wrapped in yarn and fabric.

Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis, 2023

Antique fabric, embroidery

Textiles are very in right now, 2018-present

series of rugs