my body is morning light

iv. the thoughts i make

i want to make art that communicates an expression of an experience, and i think that experience is trying to make sense of your own existence.

my existence is a story i tell myself, and any one story is also necessarily the story of many others.19 to know me and the thoughts i make is to know the relationships i keep, who i have come from, and how i am where you find me now. these thoughts cannot be removed from their relational context and still speak true.20 it is because i hold this belief that i must now take a moment to tell you some stories.

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simultaneous to the research for this writing, i have been researching my own ancestry. parts of it were already well known to me and continue to be stable in their truth. other parts were always unclear and have not become more discernible with investigation. i can’t find the stories of all my ancestors—i don’t know who some of them are. this vacuum of lived experiences prefacing my own started pulling on me more acutely this past year. i won’t lay the private details down here, but should you come to know me outside this writing, the specifics of my family history is a conversation i welcome with anyone who is gently curious.

as for my lived experience, i grew up away from all of my extended family. not for any bad reasons—actually, for very supportive reasons. i wanted to be an athlete, the kind that starts from a young age and dreams of one day being the best in the world. when i asked my parents if i could move somewhere to work toward making that dream come true, they said ok little girl and away we went. i don’t remember who i thought i was up to this point, but for the next twenty years the only identity i knew was athlete.

during this period, i never questioned who i was. moreover, white privilege has always allowed me to move through spaces without being the target of other people’s questions. i freely held fast to my one identity, and i entered adolescence and then adulthood on the receiving end of infinite support and care for that one identity. my subject position was accepted; my existence was singular. i never wondered what stories i was missing. time was linear and i was safe to fix my attention in one direction: toward the future, to my goals, and to who i wanted to be.

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when i retired from competitive sport, i also retired from the only identity i had ever known. by this time, i was so well-practiced and accomplished in self-prescribing who i was, i just carried on with that. i began trying on new ambitions, sliding into whatever singular identity claimed them. after six years of trying to find the next great thing to settle into, i recognized it wasn’t going to happen. i wasn’t going to discover a new self to replace my athlete identity with. i was already so many things, and what if i let myself be all those things at once?

this shift in how i considered my own existence created questions. it also fostered an adjustment to how i understand and experience time. time, who was previously linear and only moved forward from me as its starting point, became shapeless, extending into and through me from all angles. who was i connected to through time? why didn’t i know those people’s stories? could their stories help explain the pauses i was suddenly feeling within my own? this is how i began researching my ancestry. coincidentally, it is also the same time i began making art.

there is some satisfaction in reflecting on how these parallel events played out. while amusingly apparent to me now, it took time moving through both research practices separately before seeing that my art practice’s curiosity and my ancestral curiosity were one in the same. i performed them as two distinct cycles but understand now how they were one all along. that is the generous capacity of research, it gets you closer to your ideas.

Dyani White Hawk once said that our artistic practices are reflections of our existences.21  my understanding of my own existence has been doing a lot of expanding and collapsing and growing lately. if my artistic practice reflects my existence, then that reflection is steadily saying i wonder who i am in relationship with, i wonder who i am in flux.

within all of this searching, i can feel how the unknown pieces of my past influence the thoughts i make. the not knowing gestures to other ways of knowing. who are my lost ancestors? i don’t know—i am morning light though. and maybe that’s the point. maybe the knowing and the not-knowing are questions with the same answer. maybe the answer is the practice of becoming the question over and over and over.