These Stories Will (not) Shatter Inside of Me

This artwork centers one main theme: These stories will (not) shatter inside of me. That is the sentence that comes to mind a I think of myself, the narrators who have helped me build my dissertation, the BIPOC queer communities that speak up despite growing danger, the immigrant communities in my beloved city of Chicago who are under constant threat from ICE, and everyone who refuses to ignore genocide. I thought about the Black diaspora and how we share our histories—how this extends past us and into other minoritized cultures, whether defined by race, ability, class, queerness, or the intersection of all these things. We talk. What happens when archivists are trained to look at oral histories as a bonus material rather than as a method on par with paper? If we do not change our archival pedagogy to become more aware and inclusive of the myriad ways that different cultures express their histories, these histories will continue to disappear with the lives that hold them. Stepping outside of academia: if you know, you know. The overlooked have resisted this loss for lifetimes. The backing: The backing cloth of the piece is Tunisian crochet, which I have done out of bulky wool yarn. The backing is two toned, split in half with a sky-gray bottom and black top. I have integrated the two colors in an alternating fashion as they meet, rather than having it be one block sitting on top the other. The stitching is black yarn. The tree:The bottom displays the black silhouette of a leafless tree, stark against the gray sky, its branches expanding upwards, becoming distorted as it reaches the top half. The tree itself is dark colored, a combination of stitching and fabric to emulate the look of a tree against a winter sky. The cloth is from my stash--old t-shirts, scraps, and other things I have kept. The figure: The branches of the tree distort in the center of the piece, reaching up towards the figure of a person with their arms raised. The person is composed of stitching, silhouetting them against the black background. The branches of the tree reach into the person, turning into lightning that ricochets within them, unable to leave their form. The lightning is composed of silver yarn sewn on top of the figure. The person stretches their arms upward, the lightning in the act of releasing through their arms. The Defiance: Surrounding the person on printable fabric are cut out pages reading: THESE STORIES WILL (not) SHATTER INSIDE OF ME printed onto printable cloth. The font is the Black Trans Lives Matter font, an opensource font provided by GenderFail Press. The sentence is repeated over and over in different sizes, the fabric cut to frame the figure within.