healing together

In 2017 I put out a call for folks experiencing grief brought on or aggravated by isolation to sit for portraits and talk to me about their experiences. As I began conducting interviews, the project quickly morphed into a series about healing emotionally, spiritually, physically, and mentally.

So many of the responses I received included stories of herbal healing and the need for time to rest or just be outside. All of the interviews discussed below were initially conducted in 2017; however, I have since felt compelled to find out how these folks’ healing processes have continued and I’ve updated a few of their portraits.

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In her introduction to Octavia’s Brood, Walidah Imarisha, an incredible writer and activist, presents the term visionary fiction. Visionary fiction is a kind of speculative fiction distinguished by powerful narratives that help us imagine futures in which we all heal and thrive. Through these narratives we create spaces for playfully and creatively exploring our relationship to the world. We get excited together. We begin to understand one another's drives, desires, and needs. We offer forever morphing definitions of our identities to unite around what we have in common: the need to create the world that actively includes us. These paintings are love letters for me... and for you, who have felt undeserving of a place in the world.

My work documents stories that make healing and creating more accessible. I want to help other people realize that they have the power to heal themselves and the organisms that surround them. I have often viewed my healing efforts as daily resistance against the normalization of patterns that impede my growth. I am encouraging myself to envision healing as a lifelong process of learning from behaviors that diminish my power, then course correcting. When we spend time dreaming together, we begin to form a broader vision of what’s possible. These kinds of conversations are important for thinking about what we want and who we want to be, rather than just what we don’t want. We go beyond survival.

Getting comfortable being vulnerable enough, open enough, to get closer as a community is difficult when we are busy surviving. So, our lives become centered around individual productivity and success for the accumulation of wealth. But the prioritization of the individual seems nonsensical if we acknowledge that we are all made up of each other. Distinguished professor emerita Donna Haraway captures this message when she discusses the relevance of using the concepts of sympoiesis and holobionts when conceiving of ourselves in relation to the world. In Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, we are cast as holobionts, “entire beings” or “safe and sound beings,” that make up complex patterns of relationships. Through sympoiesis we “make-with” our fellow holobionts. We are allowed to be whole in relation to one another and contingent upon one another. The term holobiont is interesting not only because it thinks beyond the stringent distinction of individual, but because of the implications it has in the context of healing. Healing is generally defined as to restore; to make whole or sound. Holobionts are already whole and sound, so it must stand to reason that healing requires us to conceive of our wellbeing in relation to the wellbeing of the world around us.

The healing I am interested in portraying includes all forms of life in its process. The landscapes we enjoy and the food systems that sustain us rely not only on humans, but on fungi, bacteria, bugs, and plants. We don’t need to work for progress at the cost of connection to ourselves and each other. Without those connections we get lost in our isolation, desensitized to any damage we may cause and the lives we’re making precarious. There are ways to make-with or become-with one another that prioritize the thriving of as many holobionts, or members of our ecosystem, as possible. In the words of Donna Haraway: “It matters which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others.” It matters “... to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness.”

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