May 29

May 29 Shadow Archives and Legacies of Creative Material Practice

Spring / Summer 2024, Essays, Provocations

Marissa Y. Alexander, i dreamt i swam with you (detail), 2020. Hand-built white stoneware, various glazes and fired to cone 5, 57 x 46 x 34 cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

What is the nature of the human capacity for creativity, play and imagination through materials? While some creative material practices, such as craft, are often associated with long hours of work, fine materials, specific tools and special training, many creative material practices don’t take much time, space or material at all. Creativity as material human expression has many remarkable forms and ways. These forms and ways are often powerful because they are so fundamental in the experience of a person’s rich daily life, the expression of self, the forming of connections between people, and the cohesion of communities. Yet, more often than not, these forms and ways of creative material expression go unnoticed or unremarked upon, through concentration and intention, as well as effortlessly and without explicit intent, I would venture to argue that every person is creative in their material practices every single day!

Novelist and social activist Alice Walker writes movingly about this in her 1974 article “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” She asks what it had meant in the past for Black women to be considered artists. She meditates on how African-American women — who had been exploited, and had their work and their vitality extracted and stolen from them — had been driven to numbness and madness by the “springs of creativity” in them with no release. Walker named this spiritual waste. She asks, “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.” By the standards of western art, these women were not recognized as artists or geniuses because they did not have the means or access to time and materials and training to make artworks — she reminds readers that historically, objects that received the status of “artwork” were drawings, paintings and sculptures by professionalized men of the ruling class.

Walker writes of the responsibility that Black women and artists — herself included — had to search for and connect with the spiritual creativity of their great-grandmothers in their own creative practices. Here, I read between Walker’s lines and infer that creativity is denied its value within a society where the very idea of creativity has been colonized and enclosed in the terms of the limited, biased, exclusionary category of “Art.” Walker suggests that when searching for the legacy of the “far-reaching world of the creative black woman” who came before, the answer was close to home. She finds the bursting spirituality, which she suggests is the basis for “Art,” in the everyday acts and expressions — the “wild and unlikely places” — of these women. In their singing at church, in the clothes, sheets and towels they made, in the stories they told, in the vegetables and fruits they canned, in the quilts they created to cover beds (and walls in the winter), and in the gardens they brought to bloom.

Walker remembers her mother’s garden fondly: the sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums and verbena that bloomed profusely from March until late November. “A garden so brilliant with colours, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia — perfect strangers and imperfect strangers — and ask to stand or walk among my mother’s art.” She came to see her mother’s artistry in the daily parts of her life, which imparted on her an understanding of the love of beauty and respect for strength that was her heritage and her inheritance of creativity.

Walker’s article helped me to understand that canons matter.

A canon is a collection of cultural works determined to be of the highest quality, which sets the standard for the criteria of excellence that all other cultural work is judged against. For example, in “Art,” the canon serves as a highly curated collection of “artworks” and a highly edited narrative of what and why those artworks are valued. But canons are not universal, objective or above criticism.

The canon of art history is a modern European invention, which some date to the Renaissance with Vasari’s publication of artist biographies in The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). It is the basis for the academic discipline of art history, and the basis for the program of display in universal survey museums such as the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The insidiousness of the art historical canon is that it naturalized and made universal a specific Eurocentric worldview and its hierarchy of cultural values. It determined that “Art” was an intellectual, enlightened activity pursued by those trained in academies. As post-colonial scholar Edward Said points out, for there to be a canon of Art, there must be cultural objects and practices that are excluded and subordinated in contrast.

Walker’s article modelled a practice. Canons will not and should not be the same for every person. They cannot contain the multitudes of creativity that exist in “wild and unlikely places.” I can and should mindfully and intentionally determine my own values when it comes to culture and build my own networks of cultural references, narratives, connections, resources and practices.

In her introductory remarks to NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts (2007), craft historian Sandra Alfoldy notes that in parts of Europe in the 18th century, the creativity employed in making functional objects and everyday domestic practices was discounted as manual labour, to be later demoted to the category of craft. Building on Alfoldy’s point, I note that the material expressions of non-European people have been studied as specimens, and collected as anonymous artifacts. And due to the patriarchal nature of many European societies, the creativity of women has also often been overlooked. The hierarchy of cultural values that produces this canon proved to be particularly violent when weaponized to legitimize cultural theft, extraction, exploitation, assimilation and eradication as part of the cultural genocide of colonial projects, such as Canada and the United States. Culture is often the arena of contests of power and dominance — and the vehicle for movements of resistance and liberation.

Allan Sekula, a photo historian, introduced the concept of the shadow archive in his article “The Body and The Archive” (1986). Sekula writes that the photographic archive is a highly edited collection that makes concrete and visible a particular narrative that privileges certain bodies, institutions and histories over others. I see a parallel in how handmade objects are managed and treated when they enter archives and institutional collections. For Sekula, the shadow archive represents the subordinated bodies and suppressed traces of subjugated people not foregrounded in the heroic story centred by the archive.

Furthermore, the shadow archive is never separate from or removed from the archive; it is always found within and in between the lines — documents and objects of the archive’s privileged, dominant narratives. The logic of the archive established that the Euro-American settler colonial regime and the values and ideals it enshrined are visible, dominant and made legible, because the cultures it supplants had to be either assimilated into its narrative or destroyed by what the narrative represented.

Dis-identifying with the triumphant story of art history brought me, years ago, to craft and the domestic. I did not see myself, or my experiences, or my desires represented in the pages of art history textbooks. I did not find artworks made by people like me — a fat, queer, neurodivergent, white woman. What were people like me making in the past? Because I knew that we had to exist.

I attended art school in the early 2000s, amidst a post-feminist backlash. I chafed at and felt irritated with and alienated by much of the modern art that my studio instructors presented to me as models for my own creative work. I found what I needed in some of my art and craft history courses: the domestic handicrafts of European and North American settler women in the 19th and 20th centuries, the feminist artworks that catalyzed these domestic and crafty practices as a critique of the macho art world beginning in the 1960s, glimpses into experiences of mental illness and experiences of emotional turmoil in a scant few artworks by Mad or outsider artists. I found the kitschy, campy, performative material culture of queers who had to make their own fashion, decor and toys because the market didn’t make products for criminalized and pathologized “sexual deviants” and gender outlaws. This is what I encountered in the margins of my art history classes.

Without realizing it, I was slowly dismantling the canon and building my own network of connections to inspire, guide and fortify my creative practices in a way more in line with my values and what I cared about. Here, I’m mindful of Audre Lorde’s foundational critique in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1983), where she argues that the tools of oppression cannot be used to fight against oppression — the structures and histories of power will always perpetuate the oppression that enthroned that system of power.

Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed likens citations to bricks that are used to build a house. In Building a Feminist Life (2017), Ahmed describes the project of traditional western knowledge as a timber frame around which rigid brick houses are built. In opposition, she highlights her feminist citation practice as centring and prioritizing referencing the work and scholarship of women, queer scholars and scholars of colour — building a feminist house from lighter and more vulnerable material such as straw (vulnerable to dismissal from the establishment). This material analogy resonated with me. Canons of western thought are filled with the names and theories of all the same white male philosophers; I imagine a neighbourhood full of uniform brick houses, one neatly positioned next to the other. Ahmed’s metaphor prompted me to ask: Whose creative works and ideas inform my work as I build my house? What does my house look like, and who am I in neighbourship with?

I want to make things for myself — but in conversation with makers before me that made as I do. As I sit at my desk typing this essay, paint drips from the paper taped to the wall. The denim dress that I have been bejewelling a tulip on sits half done behind me on the table. A sketch of a gallery floor plan for a future curatorial research creation project lies on the shelf beside me. And a truly beautiful soup of beans, leeks and ham sits hot on the stove. All of my creative practices inform each other and are fundamental to this text.

I want to make things that speak to my communities — that is, in conversation with people who are like me or want to be in conversation with me, and who I am either in direct relation to or in relation with through shared orientation and alignment. In these ways, making is very much about connecting with my authentic self and with others. I am reminded of “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience” (1970), another of Alice Walker’s writings. She points out that “it is narrow thinking, indeed, to believe that Keats is the only kind of poet one would want to grow up to be. One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people, not by the Queen of England.”

Yes. I want to have a creative practice that creates space for myself and the others that I am in community with now. I want to create work and build a practice that creates room for future work like it and the people who will make such work.

This article was published in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Studio Magazine.