Wynn Newhouse Awards

Statement
As a queer, trans, visually impaired person from a working-class background, I have often been on the margins of the art world, and at the forefront of its changing consciousness. I was a dance artist for my whole life, until a progressive vision impairment challenged how I could move. When dance left me dizzy and disoriented I needed to shift, let go, and hone new skills. I started to integrate vocalization into my practice and learned to listen deeply to orient my body in space, and eventually I could dance as fully as I wanted to. But this changed for me again during the pandemic. Long COVID ruined my stamina, and I learned that my vision impairment was a symptom of a movement disorder that now causes me chronic pain and a more limited range of motion. All this has made dance all but impossible and changed much of what I once knew about myself and the world. So I began anew.

In the last five years, I have moved into an embroidery practice. The first time I picked up a needle and thread, my body just knew what to do. I believe this somatic-knowing comes through epigenetics or blood memory, as embroidery has a long history in my Greek and Anatolian bloodlines. Textiles offer a deep pathway toward connection - embroidery is a movement practice that reaches backward and forward in time, allowing me to dance through needles, threads, weavings, and lacework. As I stich, I envision the blind and visually impaired audience members who will be invited into my work through the tactile experience I’m creating for us. Sound and touch have become an integral part of my performance, a way to build a space where more of us can coexist. I’m inspired every day by the resilience I’ve inherited from my ancestors and ingenuity of my community. My work moves between the immense grief of the world as it too often is – inaccessible, disconnected and cruel – and the better one I hope is possible.

I have been focused for years on a large-scale hand embroidery project, which I plan to keep making and remaking all my life. Taking on such a work is an act of resistance, an assertion that I intend to live a long life against the odds. By exhibiting this project at various stages of its development, I let audiences into a process that resists ideas of perfection and completion while laying bare the time and care of often-undervalued feminized labor. In inviting my collaborators and audiences to do the work together – through witnessing, contributing to textile making, providing audio description and other means yet to come – I hope to model the sort of interdependence and kinship we all need to survive.

Having progressive disabilities requires continual ingenuity in my artistic practice, which has come to span and trouble many different mediums. I am newly exploring juxtaposing photographs of textile pieces and past performances with recordings of audio description and original music. This marriage mirrors my experience as a former dancer who must now sensate dancing by listening to sounds that allow me to access deeply somatic memories. The tension between stasis and aliveness may feel awkward or incomplete, but that is intentional: it evokes the unrealized longing I have to feel my body in motion. The strangeness helps my audience enter the world I live in.

Sandkl/Dowry Chest/Coffin December 2020 Aida cloth dyed with black tea, cotton embroidery thread 13.5” x 13.15” Please view while listening to the accompanying audio file imbedded directly underneath the image on the website. Audio file name: Dowry-Chest_Coffin.m4a. A link to a transcript of the AD is also included: “Sandkl AD Transcript”	In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky: iele stitches an altar Danspace Project May 2022 Photo documentation by Ian Douglass	In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky: weaving together Danspace Project May 2022 Photo documentation by Ian Douglass Please view images 3 & 4 while listening to the accompanying audio file imbedded directly underneath the slideshow on the website. This audio is best listened to with headphones to get full the 3D binaural effect. Audio file name: Original-Music-with-A.D.m4a. A link to a transcript of the AD is also included: “Transcript: Original Music with A.D.”	In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky: Marýa & Ogemdi Danspace Project May 2022 Photo documentation by Ian Douglass Please view while listening to the accompanying audio file imbedded directly underneath the image on the website. Audio file name: Oge-Marya-AD.m4a. A link to a transcript of the AD is also included: “A.D. Transcript: Ogemdi describes Marya’s movement”
(Trojan horse) in process Performance Space New York March 2024 Photo documentation by Rachel Papo	Collective Audio Description as iele stitches Performance Space New York March 2024 Photo documentation by Rachel Papo	Portal detail: Mycelium into blood vessels August 2023 Dimensions variable; Cotton embroidery thread, brass, jute fabric Photo by Adrien Weibgen Please view images 5, 6 & 7 while listening to the accompanying audio file imbedded directly underneath the slideshow on the website. Audio file name: Cappadocian-Sighing-Song-with-AD.m4a. A link to a transcript of the AD is also included: “Transcript: Cappadocian Sighing Song with A.D.”