Making Up Place
I can’t remember a time of my life where I wasn’t thinking about creating art. Art for me is as natural as breathing, as essential as eating and sleeping. But my path to being an artist was not so simplistic. I’ve been realistic enough to know that talent is only a starting point. I never quite “made it” as an artist because I always felt that there was never enough resources or community support to do the personal yet communal kind of work that I wanted to do. I’ve tried to bring art into my present whenever and wherever that was. I didn’t have the means to travel, so a lot of my community time was via the Internet making friends in other places who are making artwork that I love, for communities that they love. But missing opportunities to explore my art beyond personal space created a lot of insecurity in believing in my own efficacy to be an artist as a professional vocation. I thought that by becoming more versed in business and marketing I’d be able to create my own opportunities as an artist as well as manage them better than if I had just stuck to studying practice (It also, managed the pesky problem of needing to pay my bills.). My successes in that, with responsibilities of parenting and basic survival, actually resulted in pulling me away from cultivating myself as the artist could be. This led to cycles of deep depression that eventually compounded into anxiety, and new health issues. By the time I was able to circle back to the stage or studio, in any measure, I was met with panic attacks I never experienced before, some of them debilitating. In 2019, I survived the greatest tragedy of my life. What it did was destroy the pseudo-ground I had built under me, revealing what I now know is my authentic path as an artist.
In the midst of these trials, I was able to learn the extent of the damage from what years of being artistically malnourished had done to my soul, my body, my relationships, and my vision. I looked around and the people I held dearest to me in the world, in their respective corners of it, were feeling very similarly. While putting so much passion, love, and energy into the community work they were doing, their artistic natures languished from lack of rest, reflection and recovery. I began to fully understand that what art does for my self-esteem as a person, as a spiritual entity, as a Black woman, and is it powers my abilities to express myself in any aspect of life. I realized that I needed a place not just to heal, but to rebuild myself in an image according to my design as opposed to the expectations imposed through harmful social contracts. When I looked around no such place existed. So my creating such a place, would lead me back to myself. While the individual is symbiotic to the collective, I could no longer allow myself to become lost in the collective. Where can individual Black women artists be whole, together? Where can non-binary artist integrate their feminine with their masculine identities through their arts practice? With displacement being so much a part of Black experiences, the question of “how” is as important as the “where.” The Embers Lab is my attempt to answer both questions by walking the path to myself.
The Embers Lab exists because this is not work that I can, or should do alone. A space like this needs to have the input of members of our community. I want to be able to generate alternative models of artistic creation and methods of stewardship and collaboration based on the lived experiences of Black women, who carry unique bodily knowledge as arbiters of African diaspora cultures.
There are many of us in different spaces in places who would thrive off of the lessons we’ve learned tackling the systemic issues in the Canadian arts sector, and beyond. Many Black women who are artists also work in other industries and sectors where they bring their artistic sensibilities to transform organizations in the communities that they serve. But the cost is often high working under colonial constraints. We want to unlearn about how we work, and optimize how we live. So we can see our possibilities as artists realized, and the ways we are being artists beyond the arts.
The Embers Lab will champion relational works of art, and artistic working that shows the breadth, height, and depth of passion, and love for Black folks have for community. It will also support whatever we need to learn about each other, in order to understand what we really need to grow as artists, without having to consider our safety from racial violence at every turn. The Embers Lab is a gift to myself that I share with the collective. I deeply hope that it will help us heal and move forward in our creative abilities with confidence.
