Planet Stranger

“you can trust me,/ there is no planet stranger/ than the one i’m from.”

 Lucille Clifton, “note, passed to superman"

Planet Stranger is an interdisciplinary eco-feminist project composed of 35mm color film photography, etchings, handmade paper, natural ink, ceramics, book arts, and cyanotype. What binds these methods and approaches together are their roots in antiquated, alternative, or craft processes that have been denigrated within or from the fine arts hierarchy. 

This body of work was inspired by feminist writings including Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Sister Outsider, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, Paula Gun Allen’s The Sacred Hoop, and Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. These texts, to varying extents, explore the relationship between the disenfranchisement of women and the devaluing of the natural landscape that happened during the development of patriarchy in Europe and subsequently European colonialism. I supplemented these academic modes of study with my own personal experiences engaging with the natural world, from hiking and swimming to picking wildflowers and watching birds in my backyard.

These pieces are a culmination of almost a year of research and making. It is important to me that my work requires slowing down and taking the time to engage in physical labor as a way to critique our capitalist system. In my practice, I push back on the idea that the newest, fastest, easiest way to do something is the best way. And instead I offer that there is inherent value in continuing to learn and practice languages, mediums, and processes that without champions, will slowly die off.

We are currently living through a mass extinction. Planet Stranger is a call to empathize with nature and with each other as humans in order to resist the forces that are driving us toward planetary collapse and environmental destruction— capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.