A/r/tography
A/r/tography is short way to describe writing, process, and representational work created a person who is an artist, a researcher, and a teacher (a/r/t). The English suffix - graphs means “field of study”. The form -graphia, and -graphos from the Greek means “drawn or written”.
A/r/tography is a form of Arts-Based Research (ABR) that offers opportunities to create new ways to perceive the world, to think things through, and to communicate ideas. My experience of creative writing and multidisciplinary art making throughout my life have supported liminal and embodied knowing, and have played a major role in my own becoming.
My identities as an artist, researcher, and teacher weave in a practice oriented and politically attuned methodology of experience, circumstance, location, place, position, and way of knowing. Continuing to immerse in and draw from practices in the arts, I interpret and express many of my maternal revelations in both/and ways that either/or approaches have been lacking or insufficient.
Mixed Media & Cyanotype
The following images accompany writing that has been published in my dissertation and in the Demeter Press collection Give & Take: Motherhood & Creative Practice (2024). The title of the project is Luminous Butterfly Weed and Red Thread: A/r/tographical Emergence of Metamorphic Motherlines in Cyanotype.
This project was initially inspired by dreams I had near my thirty-third birthday, in which I was visited by an ancestral grandmother, whom I later traced historically. With the help of genealogists living in Finland and Sweden, I confirmed that I descend from a Sámi grandmother born in the early to mid-1500s, in Sápmi, north of Käyräsvuopio—a specific “curve” and “flow” of the Tornio River. Many generations in this lineage, prior to immigration to America, dwelled along the riverbanks of the Tornio on both sides, which are now considered territories of Finland, Sweden, and Sápmi.
In the dreams, which took place inside a timeless lavvu (dwelling), this ancestral grandmother oriented me to her home, which she wanted me to know was also my home, which was the surface skin of a traditional Sámi noadi drum. We walked together through seasons and realms representing earth, cosmos, and underworld, that centered around a central fire/hearth representing a mother sun.
This writing explores motherlines, matricultural transmissions, and mythohistorical creatrixes in a text structured around themes of remembering, voice, gestation, birth, sun, bones, identity, gift, matrescence, and regeneration. “Motherline” is a term coined by poet and psychoanalyst Naomi Ruth Lewinsky, which “ties us to our mortal bodies, our bloody beginnings and endings, our experience of the blood mysteries”.
Nine original mixed-media cyanotype images, co-created with the sun’s light, represent healing on my own grounds, outside the reductionist confines of contemporary western trauma projects. This weaving and mending express my relationships with my lineages and landscapes in expanded ways that revere and celebrate reclaimed and reauthored maternal identity, experience, and healing.
I am an adoptee, artist, and lone-single mother now on the edge of an emptying/expanding nest. Cyanotype is a photographic method relying on the sun’s ultraviolet light. Each print develops differently, and processing the images involves a willingness to hold space for what emerges. In the images, gold leaf embellishments symbolize the presence of mother sun Beaivi, and butterflies as mothers of my transformation. Red thread represents the blood and bonds of sacred relationships, creative fire, care, and mending.
Life Writing & Collage Work
The following images from an unpublished process oriented project titled SŌMA are examples of a/r/tography in the context of life writing, which is an expansive genre that includes, and moves beyond, biography. It could include personal narratives, memoirs, letters, testimonies, personal essays, diaries, biographies, and more.
