Planet Stranger

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 is rooted in 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. It also engages many texts about ecology and indigenous philosophies towards the land. 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.

This body of work pulls from almost a year of research and making. It required me to deeply engage with materials and think from the perspective of a craft person. I had to make things slowly and pull from my supply of paper from a year of making. It is important to me that my work requires slowing down, taking time, and engaging in physical  labor because it is a critique in many ways of our capitalist system that values one type of knowledge and one type of making. I made much of the paper used in the project and even used ink I made in my LAND art class. It was important to me to shoot on film and create prints with the 400+ year old technology of etching because in my practice I am trying to push back on the idea that the newest, fastest, easiest way to do something is not necessarily the best way. And that there is 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. Capitalism and our society's penchant towards the easiest and fastest over what is most sustainable contributes to this. Being able to have empathy with nature and with each other as humans is essential to resisting the forces that are driving us toward planetary collapse and environmental destruction.