I Learnt What Care Means From A Stranger

I envision the world as an intricate labyrinth of stories, where with each encounter we have the opportunity to learn from the lived experiences of others. The perplexities of human existence and a curiosity for understanding and sharing perspective is what drives my artistic practice as a visual storyteller, multidisciplinary maker, and social practitioner. My practice looks at storytelling as a catalyst for changing the perspective of another through an exploration of the role of care in our everyday lives and the stories we carry with us. I work towards understanding gestures of care and their public, social, domestic, unseen, racialized and distributed forms as a core part of my artistic practice. I bear witness to personal anecdotes and the oral histories of others to acknowledge various articulations of care expressed through lived experience, which we manifest physically through the form of material exploration. I see this act as increasingly necessary in our current socio-political environment—one built on the foundations of ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (1) as Author Bell Hooks describes in Understanding Patriarchy. However, in this context, gestures of care, no matter how carefully studied or attended to, may not be enough, and so I have developed a practice of Radical Care. In this document I define Radical Care as an embodied protest and methodology that aims to listen and be present with the unknowable other, in an embrace of vulnerability and discomfort to better understand difference. I define this need as a brown body in a white context and hope to expand empathy into support for others as I attempt to build a space for care, comfort, community and ultimately a sense of belonging. This is done by hosting gatherings, through the form of a workshop, interactive installation or sculpture, within which others are able to self-identify as wanting to participate in this particular discourse. The work stems from conversations that unfold through a series of gestures such as storytelling, listening and making to form generative environments for dialogue and exchange. Across my work, I use clay as a co-facilitator to access the memories we store in relation to tangible objects, places or people, and to extend that dialogue through material exploration, which moves beyond the need for verbal communication or common language. Materially and metaphorically, clay embodies the underlying tendencies of radical care, offering a material record of conversations and vulnerabilities that are needed to better understand the people I work with in my projects. This document works towards situating and contextualising this practice by tracing my two year journey and relocation to Vancouver, BC from Bangalore, India. It also dissects my relationship with social practice, workshops, sculpture and aesthetics in the contemporary art discourse. As I define decisions I make and reflect on how they function in the case of four specific works that resulted from the MFA program at Emily Carr; Objects of Place, Where Are You From, What Do We Owe To Each Other and Listening Vessels.