ran a quick collagraph printmaking workshop for t(w)eens recently at the library, these were the "blocks" & prints i made to demo, foam glued to paper, printed in water based inks, hard to beat as printmaking methods go in terms of cost & safety for children!
dinosaur footprints because that's the summer reading theme this year, school of lil fish to use up all the footprint scraps & bc they bring me joy
had a necklace of mainly clear seed beads & 3 of these mal de ojo beads on string which i never wore so my car wore it, this way i still won't be wearing it but my car will be that much more powerful (& look that much cooler) as it protects us both, still to decide what to do with the 3rd hand & eye that didn't ultimately suit this piece...
"installation view" amid all the butterflies (not made by me):
a box made to hold some of a collection of emptied cottonwood leaves, & jointly to function as a sort of artist's book case holding future cottonwood paper-making experiments
undergoing something like meiosis, i shaped & tore all of these pages with the thought that they might better suit the original cloth/wood cover, but it wasn't meant to be & ultimately they needed a mounting or alternate binding to stand for themselves, rendered specimen(s), pinned & bound
cotton watercolor paper & thread, book board, lokta paper, ogura lace paper, wheatpaste
these are the pages from the original book, rebound in a cover (or covers) i made to better suit their strength & form, with papers that to my eyes mimic the movements & patterns of light & shadow under trees or wings, & engage more literally the name "mourning cloak"
linen printed with flax (linum lewisii) & embroidered with cotton thread, stone, usnea lichen
now in a gallery, hung/bound with a frame of reclaimed pallet wood & wire
thinking through what i can offer to & in return for all that i have learned from the plants & other non-human entities around me, & what all we may yet exchange
book presented on a shelf made from pallet wood; each page spirals outward with a handwritten line of a poem i wrote as i went, thinking of ballistic seed dispersal, the texture of these seedpods, "invasive"ness, & soft & hard power, text below
the soft power of wisteria is in its flowers / so many so-called invasives first transported for their beauty / & those not? some use, some function, surely / if not all those known in its native range... / when I meet an apparently ornamental flower for the first time / I introduce myself, where I'm from, & I ask the same / I grew up beneath a wisteria arch that never fruited / & meeting this one in the fall was first drawn in by the pods
great green beings of a velvet softness / uncommon outside of textiles & antlers / is this a foreign policy? or a weapon? / or is it both, together an invasion? / on quiet nights you can hear the pop of their ballistics / chain reactions of projectile seeds launching their neighbors / into the sky like skeet targets or the bullets themselves / until, with a clatter, they come back to earth
beads made in the rosary tradition with a "clay" of cooked down rose petals & honey locust leaves, arch painted with my fingers in a mix of clay & sawdust
i've passed a lot of time this year under & around honey locusts, & been moved by the huge, cross-like form of many of their thorns in wilder settings & the absence of any thorns on those planted in urban settings. thinking about protection, manipulation, threats & predators now millennia gone, prayer, & from all of this...
corn (Dakota black pop-, Hopi blue, Tohono O'odham 60-day, verde de Oaxaca, multicolor de Jala, morado y blanco de Santa Cruz, bloody butcher, earth tones dent, Pueblo sweet [husk], undisclosed genetically modified variety used by argo [starch])
seedy hamsa/offering of protection for native corn varieties, on mal de ojo & the failures of language & legislation, an invitation into stewardship, too: the loose seeds are all from Jala, a town in Nayarit famous for growing the largest mazorcas in the world
esto lo hice pensando en el siguiente párrafo del artículo 4o de la constitución mexicana, que fue editado en marzo; la parte en cursiva es nueva, y ejemplifica el neoliberalismo del gobierno:
«Toda persona tiene derecho a la alimentación nutritiva, suficiente y de calidad. El Estado lo garantizará. México es centro de origen y diversidad del maíz, que es un elemento de identidad nacional, alimento básico del pueblo de México y base de la existencia de los pueblos indígenas y afromexicanos. Su cultivo en el territorio nacional debe ser libre de modificaciones genéticas producidas con técnicas que superen las barreras naturales de la reproducción o la recombinación, como las transgénicas. Todo otro uso del maíz genéticamente modificado debe ser evaluado en los términos de las disposiciones legales para quedar libre de amenazas para la bioseguridad, la salud y el patrimonio biocultural de México y su población. Debe priorizarse la protección de la biodiversidad, la soberanía alimentaria, su manejo agroecológico, promoviendo la investigación científica-humanística, la innovación y los conocimientos tradicionales.
steel (welded with oxyacetylene), terra cotta pot, mucilage (de nopal), cornstarch, clay (from rio grande), laser prints on paper, corn husks (from Ancestral Acres), cotton thread, stone
top right image is from opening night, the rest are taken about a week post-mucilage drop; form & title draw on the Pitch Drop Experiment run out of the University of Queensland, here reimagined for olotón, over a base of documents including a US Patent Application & the UN-approved Access & Benefit Sharing Agreement between a representative of Mars inc. & Totontepec Villla de Morelos; my artist's statement in this tag (& all that follows) includes more context
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untitled - 2025
clay (from rio grande), corn silk & woven husks (from Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute), laser printed bilingual zines containing el Espacio Estatal en Defensa del Maíz Nativo de Oaxaca's 2019 Declaratoria/Declaration
unfired clay berry basket intended as a material & narrative foil to its neighbor, kept stocked with zines for the taking which contain el Espacio Estatal en Defensa del Maíz Nativo de Oaxaca's texts & end with a linktree for more on olotón
laser prints on paper, paper (dyed with goatheads), goatheads, glue, beeswax, cotton thread (dyed with cochineal)
series of 3 [fly]paper traps, each full of goatheads of a particular ripeness, each branded "ᗡƎW∀N PEST" & printed with a 6-line poem (text below); for the opening reception we had the snack tables right under these which brought me great joy (i recreated the lemon & cranberry curd spiral tart for it)
(clay pigment powders painted on the wall with a slight gradient)
my first ever group exhibition just closed, all works from my cohort this term in a course centered around seeds. the title for our show is pulled from a piece of my writing, the rest of which is at the bottom of this post. also below are my pages from a zine/"catalog" we put together, & a whirlwind tour in fuzzy photos of the pieces i made for the exhibition. individual posts for each to follow
these pages feature an essay(ish) text i wrote on the subjects of legislation, corn (specifically olotón), & protection; something in the realm of an artist's statement... among the rest of these collages are both sides of some cornhusks i wove, one of my cottonwood seed papers from the spring, & native corn seeds from my family's hometown. the best elote i've ever had was an ear of this purple variety
image text:
On 17 March 2025 Mexico amended article 4 of its constitution. With this addition, the constitution declares that the corn grown in the country "should be free from genetic modifications" to protect an "element of national identity," but this protection is limited. Most obviously it is exclusive to corn, at the expense of other parts of the many varied foodways within current borders. The nationalistic impulse of this policy is openly stated, too, corn made icon & so isolated on its pedestal. Who will protect the milpa? Open pollination should be ever so slightly safer but what about the soil? My tíos in Jalisco tried this year to grow native squash in our family's portion of the ejido & in failure found proof of what Monsanto & their peers' products can do to land & seeds. Years of soil remediation lie ahead, & in the meantime, whether to make ends meet or from a lack of care, many throughout the region continue to sell & grow genetically modified seeds, just calling them anything but. No incentive is offered here for compliance (or punishment for non-), let alone support for those whose survival has come to depend on a predictable crop. Whatever language in this policy seems in conversation with anticolonial thought is not fully integrated into the rest of the constitution, & certainly is not put into practice. Most egregious to me is that this policy intent on protecting corn domestically offers nothing, not even false promises, to protect against biopiracy.
Olotón, known to some as Sierra Mixe corn, names a group of varieties from the Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca, which have attracted colonial eyes since at least the 1940s for their ability to "self-fertilize," secreting mucilage from aerial roots in which nitrogen fixing bacteria then find a home & a meal. Through this relationship, olotón makes nearly obsolete the vast amounts of fertilizer other corn varieties require, particularly those grown in a monoculture. No matter how their press releases may spin it, for Mars inc., working with UW—Madison & UC Davis, this ability represented little more than opportunity, & in 2015 Mars' BioN2 entered into an agreement with just one of the many communities who have tended to & selected for the olotón we know today: Totontepec Villa de Morelos. Under this contract they could research & eventually patent olotón's mutualistic productive capacity. Totontepec, meanwhile, would see only a fraction of the profit from this research, if that, & the rest of olotón's communities none. The national government signed off on this deal, & while it may have preceded the implementation of this year's legislation, their ability to legitimately & earnestly protect corn should nonetheless be questioned.
Recognizing this & the intent of transnational corporations to claim control over olotón's future, el Espacio Estatal en Defensa del Maíz Nativo, a group of Oaxacan organizations united by their work to protect native corn varieties, released their 2019 declaration: "Maíz Comunal de Oaxaca para el Mundo", later published in English as "Oaxacan Comunal Corn for the World". Following this declaration, they entrusted seeds of olotón to La Via Campesina a global coalition of peasant farmers (campesinos) & other food producers (also notable for coining "food sovereignty"), to be shared with growers around the world & make dealing with corporations unnecessary for those who will place relationships over profit with olotón, & in doing so help it adapt to a broader range of ecological conditions for the future.
This, to me, is true protection, & in identifying its heart I might point to the everyday, mundane, small ways in which we sustain relations with one another. It is through these that we allow ourselves, our cultures, & our kin to be more than stagnant, memorials to a time we'll never truly "return" to. Protection of this nature has the potential to resolve the so-named "invasive"ness of species. I know no better way to limit the spread of Siberian elm seeds than to eat them, & until we put in the work to build such a relationship with goatheads can they be blamed piercing those who get to close? We recognize that when a rose or a honey locust covers itself in thorns it is an effort toward protection & survival, a capacity to wound in turn if not a guarantee of safety. Safety is an empty & dangerous promise regardless. I've learned to protect myself & others in those stolen moments of learning from, tending to, & when fortunate eating those greener. Protection & nourishment aren't so different, at their best both are manifestations of care. When a wisteria launches its seeds across a land it's known only for a generation it is a gesture toward faith & futurity, one more gift to those that follow. My wonder, then, is the least I can offer in return. Who might I feed in the end? & Who along the way?
end image text.
i bound the zines (inkjet printed) with a saddle stitch using cotton thread i dyed with cottonwood catkins, which starts purple & turns a light green gradually over about a week
whirlwind tour begins here:
& here's the writing the show's title came from, 10% reflection on the course, the other 90% owed to my surroundings as i wrote, sitting on a tree trunk stretching horizontally out over the river's edge:
What a wonder! To be green & dirty, to chase a process & heed mentors as organic as I strive to be. I've never before had too many ideas in an art class, instead clinging to the first & only to break the surface, chasing after its breach no matter how far that takes me downstream. How lush & pillowy! A soil worth sinking into, cratered with rainfall, dusted with detritus, all-new galleries etched into the clay layers as the smaller among us forage. I'm grateful for the quiet, for my raucous neighbors, for discourses on decomposition & all that follows, & for the corn! Wobbly rows gnawed to the stem, a weight & form unparalleled in how they hold my hands. Yes I'm grateful: to laugh in it & muddy my soles, to pick the burrs from my clothes & let them pierce my fingers instead, to leave my prints on everything & nothing & let go at last of the lasting. It's regenerative forgetfulness, a recollection in spiderwebbing filaments no matter the angle. It's green, & dirty, & we could learn from its vivipary.
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