00:05:37.680the deal that we make, the covenant that we make when we come into this space. And that is that
00:05:44.800here, if nowhere else, we can release our shame and we can release our judgment, not our good
00:05:51.920judgment, not our critical awareness, but that piece of us that feels compelled to rank and judge.
00:06:02.080And when we release that feeling for other people, we find that we can also release that feeling from ourselves. Like, let's experiment with a place where we can really be ourselves. What happens? What happens in a space where you can unmask and say what you think without assuming that you're going to be judged or mocked for it?
00:06:26.080so that's what this candle represents and as long as it's lit and as long as we're in this circle
00:06:32.200together let it be that place let it be that experimental place where we can just be who we
00:06:40.300are or maybe even find out who we are because we've never had an open space to explore the
00:06:47.000possibilities before. So this month we are talking about art, which is absolutely one of my
00:06:57.460most favorite, makes me excited topics in all the world. I am kind of a visual artist, you know,
00:07:10.100and a performance artist. But above all of that, I think of myself as an art appreciator.
00:07:18.980I have never had a piece in a gallery. You know, I've done album covers and the illustrations for
00:07:25.540both of our books. But I've never had a piece in a gallery. But art galleries are one of my
00:07:33.640absolute favorite spaces in the whole world. And I'm not even sure exactly why, but I get so
00:07:42.180excited. And my spouse says that he loves going to galleries with me because I get so excited.
00:07:50.340Because to me, they aren't these like cold, staid, quiet, militantly quiet spaces.
00:08:01.200if I see a work of art that makes me laugh I laugh
00:08:05.540and if I see a work of art that gets me excited I
00:08:08.520woo you know I've wooed in galleries all over the world
00:08:26.220kind of open this what will be a creation and discussion space. I shared this
00:08:35.940in our coven space. Again, it wasn't homework, so there will be no quiz.
00:08:44.140But it's a report that was put together by Artists at Risk Connection and Penn America
00:08:50.220called Art is Power. 20 artists on how they fight for justice and inspire change. And the foreword
00:09:03.060is written by Paul Rucker, and something that he wrote that I wanted to bring to us here tonight.
00:09:12.020And Paul Rucker wrote, those who target us know, just like we do, that artistic expression is one of the most powerful tools we have to uplift marginalized voices, change minds, and influence policies.
00:09:35.160So tonight, we're going to give you a prompt for creation and also a prompt for conversation.
00:09:42.020So while you gather ye tools, Risa is going to read a section of her chapter from New Moon Magic that inspired this conversation tonight.
00:12:23.180Actually, that was one of those bullshit things.0.94
00:12:25.560But I had suggested, you know, as an option that watercolor sets are super cheap and super accessible.0.95
00:12:36.740So in preparation for this meeting yesterday, I went down to my local, it's called the Folly.
00:12:43.060It's mostly party supplies, but it's kind of one of those a little bit of everything stores.
00:12:48.400And I got this paint palette. I'm holding it up.
00:12:51.340It has 12 colors and a palette, and it was $2.49, which, by the way, is what I paid for a fucking tomato at the grocery store on that same trip.0.89
00:13:06.420So I think if I had to choose, it might be difficult, but $2.49.0.75
00:13:13.680So I grabbed this $2.49 palette of paints, and I came home, and I made two pieces.
00:13:21.340This is the first one. I'm holding it up. It is some squiggly, sharpie lines that kind of intersect and connect over each other. And then I filled in the negative spaces with various colors.
00:13:38.080and when I finished it I thought oh wonderful oh I love this this was so relaxing I had such a
00:13:47.060great time doing this what a what a wonderful way to pass 15-20 minutes and then I did a painting
00:13:54.660of my dog and again this is a watercolor painting of a black miniature poodle it's kind of blue and
00:14:02.300purple. And when I finished this painting, I said to myself, wow, what a terrible painting.
00:14:11.280That doesn't look anything like my dog. I screwed up the light source. I made her muzzle tube.
00:14:19.480So this, all this to say is the parable of,
00:14:24.300I would suggest choosing for tonight or for anti-anxiety medication
00:14:30.900something completely abstract as abstract as possible because if you paint a dog and it
00:14:39.540doesn't really look like a dog you go into this place of judgment of product product product
00:14:46.460my product isn't the product that i envisioned but when you're just making colorful beautiful
00:14:52.260delightful blobs like there is no wrong answer and you can really just exist in the process
00:15:00.440process of the making. For those of you who are listening after the fact, I will photograph and0.97
00:15:07.000post my dog painting and my blob painting. But again, I just want to say that you don't have to
00:15:14.500be good at rendering. You don't have to be good, period. For this exercise, you just have to be
00:15:28.920in the moment of creation and see what flows out of you. And there's no room for judgment because
00:15:34.940nobody knows what an amorphous message from the universe looks like. So nobody can tell you that
00:15:40.920it doesn't look like an amorphous message from the universe. There's no wrong blob. There is no wrong
00:15:46.660blob. As Linda said in the chat. So again, that's just kind of a parable before you actually put
00:15:54.180are equal all blobs are equal thank you yes so again I wanted to kind of open with that because0.99
00:16:04.260I don't want you to judge what you make but before you put pen to paper or paint to paper
00:16:10.640or needle to material or papier mache to balloon or before you start squishing into your clay or
00:16:20.580your homemade Play-Doh, before you start gluing scraps of paper to your paper bag, just keep in
00:16:27.420mind, if you don't know what it is, then it can't be wrong. So that's my advice for that moment. So
00:16:33.440I'm going to give you the creation prompt, and then we'll get into our conversation.
00:16:39.740The creation prompt is the following. What does it feel like to be a witch?
00:16:50.580And I would encourage you to not use words if you can avoid putting text in your work, just for this.
00:16:59.580I love putting text in my work, and I definitely wouldn't say, like, don't do that in general, but for this particular exercise, how do we visually articulate a feeling?
00:18:31.900so i i brought a couple of different questions for consideration and hopefully
00:18:38.120one of them will sort of allow you to speak on what you wanted to speak on tonight and if it
00:18:43.820doesn't completely ignore it and say whatever comes up for you that's also really important
00:18:49.380for us that you feel like if something comes up for you then you're in a space where we can believe
00:18:56.160that that is a download from spirit that needs to be spoken in this circle here tonight so even if
00:19:04.360for you a download for spirit is like a jolt of electrical energy and the
00:19:11.540great spurious unknown that that is whatever that that feels like for you or makes sense in your
00:19:18.140brain that's another slogan the great spurious unknown we're all full of slogans oh my gosh
00:19:24.220So question number one, how does art, and when I say art, I mean either making or appreciating or both, how does art influence your mental health, your witchcraft, your activism, your identity?
00:19:54.220And if maybe you're a person who feels like a creative bud who has not yet burst open into bloom, maybe you have an inner saboteur who tries to tell you that you may as well not paint the dog because the painting of the dog is going to be shitty and it's not going to look like your dog.
00:20:13.040And then why did you bother painting the dog?
00:20:18.140I get it. So I brought a different question so that you don't have to feel like you need to be Leonardo da Vinci in order to join this conversation.
00:20:28.280The other question is, who? So what artists have, and then the same question, have influenced your mental health, your activism, your identity, your worldview?
00:20:48.140And I really want you to think not just about painters, but dancers and filmmakers and choreographers, and especially consider fashion as a visual language.
00:21:04.120Consider clothing as an art of craft, right?
00:21:10.380and how does that visual language how did their communication of the visual language of paint or
00:21:16.340film or fashion influence you and make you who you are I'm going to start really quickly because
00:21:23.440for me it's like super obvious to me when I think about it that I discovered John Waters
00:21:31.640and david lynch when i was 11 and 12 years old respectively and i think that that that
00:21:43.020comedic absurdity and that dramatic surrealism absolutely factored into my identity as a human
00:21:53.800being my perspective as an adult as a child then and then as a teenager and then still
00:21:59.600as an adult going into this world. I can legitimately say that I would not be who I
00:22:10.000am today had I not stumbled on these filmmakers when I was so young and impressionable.
00:22:15.780So I turn it to you. I turn it over to you, the Missing Witches Coven. What does art do for you
00:22:24.480and what have artists done for you let's start with linda hi linda hi there how are you
00:22:31.500i'm great i'm so happy to be here me too um still trying to um i don't know if you all do this in
00:22:41.040canada but we're still trying to recover from changing the time which we did this weekend
00:22:46.000we sprang forward and now we hate that as a collective we hate that right we hate that yes
00:22:53.880we do definitely hate it it's supposed to be light in the morning not i mean you know it's
00:22:58.380going to get lighter at night anyway because the days are getting longer and the statistics show
00:23:02.660that like strokes go up uh car accidents go up heart attacks go up in the week after0.56
00:23:09.300when you fuck with people's circadian rhythm it's not pretty so um i'm working on a puppet0.84
00:23:17.980i've never made a puppet so this is my little puppet that i'm working on0.98
00:23:23.840and she's gonna have hair when i get done made out of little fabric scraps and i also made a
00:23:33.620little quilted box that i had two blocks of a quilt that i had left over and so i made a box
00:23:41.640out of it um the other thing is i have he became a good friend um his name is jay hubbard and he
00:23:50.700lives in north carolina and we started chatting and he he's an artist and i love his artwork
00:23:58.160just absolutely love it mostly abstract but he had this can you describe it for the listeners
00:24:05.100is it is a venus well i call it venus it is like almost like a reclining um venus of willendorf
00:24:14.380figure very round and and all rainbow swirly colors and like and she's in a blue background
00:24:24.200like almost like she's lying in water and i saw that on his blog or his website or whatever
00:24:32.660and i just contacted him and contacted him immediately and said i have to have that i
00:24:40.640have to have that painting he had never sold a painting before he didn't know what to charge for
00:24:47.360it he didn't know how to get it to me in colorado from north carolina but i bought it um and it's
00:24:55.460been a few well it's been gosh I want to say 10 years maybe I've carried it to Texas with me
00:25:04.320I carried it here I will never be without Venus and I still have a lot of artwork that's still
00:25:10.820wrapped up in bubble wrap but she's on the wall and she's going to be on the wall wherever I am
00:25:16.060and so if I had the money and the space I would buy everything that he paints because I love it
00:25:25.340so much and you know because because I kept telling him that and because I kept saying
00:25:32.000you really need to show this stuff to people and he's very much like the inner critic for himself
00:25:37.840and so he has since gone on to you know he hasn't done it in a while because of COVID and all the
00:25:44.780other stuff but for a while he opened up his own little gallery with his wife and he sold more
00:25:49.260paintings and you know he wants to do it again now that things have kind of settled down a little
00:25:54.440bit and so yeah that you know I want to know why you love that Venus painting so much how does it
00:26:04.480make you feel when you look at it because I'm a fat woman and it's me and you know it's me and
00:26:15.580and I love it it's beautiful it's just absolutely gorgeous I love the colors I'm a swimmer my
00:26:22.260alcatraz tattoo that i swam alcatraz when i was 54 and it just makes me feel like it just it gives
00:26:31.180me peace and it gives me joy i think that's like the definition of cool is like something or someone
00:26:36.800that can make you feel like comfortable and peaceful and super excited all at the same time
00:26:41.760exactly i mean the minute i saw it it was just like oh no that's that's mine that's mine
00:26:47.000amazing thank you so much for sharing what's the name of the artist again
00:26:52.760his name is his j hubbard i love it i just i love his style i love his color i just i love it
00:26:59.060yes that's the only reason that i want more walls yeah
00:27:03.600i don't want a bigger house but somehow i want more walls
00:27:08.080kalika what how has art influenced your life how is making art or being an unappreciated
00:27:16.980of art influenced your life um art has influenced my life from such a young age all kinds of art
00:27:28.560like i danced i still i'm trying to get my body into movement more um but i i used to dance all
00:27:43.560the time that was actually the first form of art that I did um and then I did pottery and choir
00:27:58.160and I took art history because I loved it so much
00:28:04.180and it just made me feel like my life would be falling apart and I could go into the pottery
00:28:18.600studio or a dance studio and either put on some music and dance until I just was lying on the
00:28:29.320floor or literally throw a blob of clay on a wheel and the the rhythm of the wheel would just
00:28:39.120center me i do have kind of a interesting story um but art to me is very alchemical
00:28:47.520it changes and it good art to the right person it will change them regardless of medium and and
00:28:57.100there's an impermanence to it especially with dance but I learned that that a very hard lesson
00:29:04.220that that's true for other arts as well so the story I was getting ready to put a pottery piece
00:29:15.480into my school art show I worked on this piece almost the entirety of the year I it started from
00:29:25.640a dream I dreamt the piece that I made and then I started making it and it was a tree
00:29:33.280and it was this beautiful gnarled oaky tree not like the horror story type where it's kind of
00:29:45.400stylized but like a real old oak tree where they're just beautiful and majestic but the limbs
00:29:54.360I had they were they went up and it almost looked like hands holding a ball I threaded wire
00:30:03.000all through the the limbs of the tree and it was up on display before the art show and the day of
00:30:12.640the shelf broke and everything crashed I was on that shelf including my piece
00:30:24.360so it was like this lesson of art like it it changed me as I was making it because I really
00:30:32.760felt like it was something that was supposed to get out of my brain somehow and everyone who
00:30:40.840who saw it while I was making it thought it was moving but they couldn't describe why
00:30:49.460and then the the crash so i'm like okay impermanence that is my lesson
00:30:55.840yeah i mean we talk so much about like valuing process over product right so that's like the0.89
00:31:05.180real like kick in the ass version of that or the banksy piece that as soon as the auction ended0.90
00:31:14.360fell through the paper shredder you know0.98
00:31:16.880but do you still you have fond memories of the making of the piece right or are they all just
00:31:25.020like you wept and wept and wept and never wanted to make another tree again
00:31:29.960um actually it was kind of traumatizing i didn't draw another tree until um that night with
00:31:40.060dead leading circle and we were so many years later supposed to be drawing a sigil and i drew
00:31:48.040a tree yeah i remember that yeah so you're back you're back with some tree art for the house i
00:31:58.100love that i love that full circle moment because that was such a beautiful ritual space that deb
00:32:03.560was holding for us and that that would be the time that the tree art would want to come back
00:32:08.900through you I that's delightful yeah and I have other stories about like dance being
00:32:16.940impermanent oh my goodness so many stories about dance yes yeah Risa has has written and spoken
00:32:26.380about Anna Halperin I was gonna say yeah yeah well we have it we're gonna try to follow the
00:32:32.440new moon the chapters in the book this year for the rest of the year with our circles and play
00:32:39.560with the rituals that are in there and conjure new ones together and there's a chapter on dance
00:32:43.380so we'll have to talk about how we will engage dance together at that time could we go i'd love
00:32:52.940too because i oh i was i i have an idea okay let's take this offline yeah yeah yeah we'll come back to
00:33:05.060it and deb happens to be right here to answer um to the making of space look at that hi i also have
00:33:16.440some tree art to show you Kalika that I will show you later um offline um and um but and what I'm
00:33:25.180going to say is kind of speaks to what you said too which is interesting that I'm right after you
00:33:30.460so what I want to talk about right now is the power of art and making art the deep the depths
00:33:41.060of that power and um in relationship to my experience as an artist what um
00:33:50.960in the times that I've done art in my life I've done a lot of dance
00:33:56.360I've also done a lot of visual different visual arts and um and what I've learned over the time
00:34:06.100of working on art projects is that I always learn something really intense when I take on a big art
00:34:17.380project and then see it through, like something that I didn't expect to understand or know about
00:34:23.660when I went into doing the project. And I realized that it's because for the hundreds of thousands
00:34:32.060of years before we had writing art was how we kept the it was the receptacle for all of our
00:34:40.220cultural artifacts so everything in the culture was held in the arts and it was passed from
00:34:49.140generation to generation in the through these artistic mediums and you can now anytime still
00:34:58.620access that that cultural repository or that human species species repository by plugging into
00:35:08.680deeply into your art because it's all still there waiting for us and it's been there with the
00:35:15.420the thousands of generations of power put on top of it as we keep doing it over so much time all
00:35:25.480those generations each one adds more power and adds more knowledge and adds more information
00:35:31.520and it's this very vast and very intense source of power for us but I want to speak specifically
00:35:42.760about a time that I did a photo essay I want to do photo essay on the three muses
00:35:47.600and as I was working on the three muses like what imagery am I going to use where am I going to take
00:35:54.380these pictures and how are they going to represent these three the three muses are if you don't know
00:36:00.260song dance and story um they have greek names but i can't remember them right now
00:36:06.600and um and as i was working on these muses i came to understand over the couple of months that it
00:36:14.540took that our brains are hardwired to learn and to remember and to conceptualize through these
00:36:23.600three media so it's another way in which it's like a source of power for us because not only
00:36:31.660is it a cultural power but it's physically embodied power in that your brain is actually
00:36:37.820hardwired to both learn remember and understand through these media of song dance and stories
00:36:46.460telling i i have to add like um archaeologists have found human art um as old as 45 000 years
00:36:57.260i believe that that's currently the oldest art that they've found um is 45 000 years old
00:37:03.020so to me that speaks so much about how art is like a part of our very humanity like a part of
00:37:11.680our dna yeah and there's a there's a archaeologist who did a study where she mapped out um the the
00:37:21.620signals this this uh the sigils and signs and like images that were used over a 30 000 year period
00:37:30.100over all of the world and they're all consistent meaning that these people had this same language
00:37:37.880for 30,000 years that's more generations than we can even count of information that was passed down
00:37:45.580in this like way that was kept for so much time so there's some deep knowledge in there and if
00:37:52.760you want to connect into your ancestral knowledges or your prehistoric ancestors or even like cosmic
00:38:01.520reality like art is a place where you can do that there's another slogan art is a place where we can
00:38:08.820connect with that cosmic reality and again i want i want to one last thing i'm going to add to it
00:38:15.500which is if in hope that book hope in the dark rebecca solnick talks about the power of art to
00:38:22.000incite change and activism and that all revolutionary movements start with um symbolic
00:38:29.980like actions which are in the form of art usually yes one of the um artists that wrote in this um
00:38:40.380when i opened i i mentioned that uh that report art is power and one of them calls artists the
00:38:48.200canary in the coal mine artists are the ones who are going to say something first or notice
00:38:54.080something first and i think that we can say that about witches too that maybe we have that in
00:39:00.120common that we are we are the canaries in the coal mine um yeah and maria gimboutas who was
00:39:08.120like i don't think that these are just like markings on pottery i think that this might be
00:39:12.280like a language and it's language all the patriarchy was like maria gimboutas is you're so
00:39:18.260dumb you know right but that's those are the those are the images that that woman documented and she1.00
00:39:25.280did like like thousands of thousands of sites of research and found and actually found patterns0.92
00:39:32.920and found that they are a language yeah okay i have to add a little other piece from new magic
00:39:38.740here i've thought of this same piece now three times from other things that came up
00:39:42.300i have to add a tiny piece about black panther the film the so0.82
00:39:48.360we wrote what would a feminist anti-racist rooted version of art and symbol magic look like
00:39:56.700afro-futurist artists give us a pretty good idea costume designer ruth e carter drew on the adrinka
00:40:03.240symbol language of the bono people of guy man to create the visual world of black panther
00:40:07.720and in doing so she suggests a joyful other way to approach the crafting of hyper sigils in our
00:40:13.140lives and in culture digging into the symbol language of our ancestors to craft and wear
00:40:17.880icon messages that speak beyond words in a visual emotional language of the worlds we want to live
00:40:22.960in draws those possibilities into the living moving breathing sweaty present in wakanda the
00:40:28.960adrinka symbol for cooperation is emblazoned on capes that move like fabric blankets until a
00:40:33.820gesture unlocks their secret technology and they become shields. She used a drink of symbols that0.99
00:40:39.160date from at least the 1600s and were developed to make points of connection between tribes
00:40:43.500with different dialects and also to communicate truths too complex for words. Like runes, the
00:40:49.400symbols themselves have power. They are not similes for the spirits they stand for. They are, in some
00:40:55.100fundamental way, the spirits themselves. The capes with their ancient symbols borrowed from the real
00:41:01.060world are a humming rippling piece of the utopian magic in the movie so much of what you were saying
00:41:09.480deb i was like hallelujah so such a beautiful insight yeah the symbols are magic right they
00:41:16.500hear it yeah yeah and if you are blocked um about having art as part of your practice of your
00:41:25.120witchcraft or your humanity then i i would absolutely suggest breaking that seal and
00:41:31.300and connecting to one of the most ancient things that people we were making art as far as archaeology
00:41:38.640tells us anyway before we were doing agriculture that's how deep art is in us so with that i will
00:41:47.520turn to Michelle. Hi, Michelle. Hello, everyone. And thank you for this beautiful space. I'm
00:41:54.300awed by the wisdom that's already been shared here. I'll try to make my comments brief to
00:42:00.200allow lots of space for other folks. I never consider myself an artist. So I really loved
00:42:09.360you bringing dance into this space because I am a dancer. I started dance class when I was three,
00:42:16.080went all the way through Point Ballet, all of that. Now I dance to whatever the music tells me
00:42:21.540to do. So art in motion, I love that. Lots of artists along the way have inspired me. I love
00:42:30.080when you get sucked into a piece of art, and you just kind of sit with it, and you enter this
00:42:37.140other dimension as you contemplate what it all means. But the story I wanted to share with you
00:42:43.520all is I'm a geologist and a mathematician. So nature is a beautiful artist to me. And geologists
00:42:53.320will also take a rock and cut what they call a thin section. It's like a paper, literally a paper
00:43:00.020thin section of the rock and shine light in it. And as you rotate it around, it polarizes and
00:43:07.680shows in different ways. They call them thin sections. I will say they're not fun to make
00:43:12.300because the oils give off all these fumes and you can only stay in the lab for about 15 minutes at
00:43:18.160a time and then you got to back out because you're too high and then you come back into the lab but
00:43:22.940if you've never seen thin sections i encourage you to google it when you get done with this
00:43:26.520because it's just beautiful artwork in and of itself um but on my mathematician side mc escher
00:43:34.280so i don't know anything about his background i'm hoping that he's a whole person to bring
00:43:39.620into this space. If he's not, please forgive me. My grandmother on my mother's side passed away
00:43:45.140two winter solstices ago. And probably 10 years before that, she was in late stage Alzheimer's.
00:43:51.720And so the last time she was still mobile, and she came to my house from Ohio down to North
00:43:56.480Carolina. And I had this NC Escher photo above my kitchen table. And it's one of those, the stairs
00:44:01.880go up, the stairs go down, the stairs go sideways. And she was on this really interesting 20 minute
00:44:07.620loop conversation and what would always snap her out of it was that picture because she would turn
00:44:14.080to it and she would say what is that where are the stairs going and we would just have this
00:44:20.680conversation about this nc asher picture and then she'd cycle back through this conversation about
00:44:25.180uh moonshiners for some reason she was watching a lot of that but anyways i just wanted to bring
00:44:30.800my grandmother into this space and um thank you for letting me share this story thank you
00:44:36.500and it's so funny the sort of like the parallel between communicating with someone with dementia
00:44:45.860and the art of mc escher right these sort of staircases that don't go anywhere and the
00:44:52.000confused perspective there's really um there's something i can taste in my mouth about that
00:44:57.920is it the taste of a great short story i hope you'll write it michelle yeah
00:45:03.280jasmine what did you bring how has art influenced your life or artists
00:45:12.300oh man i was when it comes to visual art i didn't have a choice because my mother's a visual artist
00:45:18.980well that would be the number one artistic influence in your life for sure yeah and my
00:45:25.220my mom our our relationship is it's better now but growing up I was undiagnosed and she
00:45:32.080because my father was a federal politician she became essentially a single parent
00:45:36.780and so things have of course like the ship has kind of chilled out now um but yeah there she
00:45:47.600always says that like art is a healer and my mother's gone through a lot of medical
00:45:51.740stuff in the past couple years you know she's we always joke that she's like losing0.54
00:45:58.600she keeps losing pieces she has half a pancreas no gallbladder no appendix
00:46:04.960sort of her bowels missing now like oh you know these things but she always goes back to the art0.99
00:46:10.820um and now that she has a granddaughter my cousin or my cousin my niece penny who turns three
00:46:19.720seven days after my mother turned 65 this year so my mom is a spring equinox baby march 21st
00:46:29.700and penny is on the 28th and it's nice to get videos of them every friday my niece goes to
00:46:38.720the house and they paint together inside this like studio that my dad had built for my mom
00:46:47.080and my mom calls it the Hildegard which is my grandmother's name um who is Bavarian so
00:46:54.840Penny because it was my birthday on the leap year my three-year-old niece made me some art
00:47:00.040it's an octopus oh okay it's an octopus please describe it in detail listen it's um so it is a
00:47:12.780i don't know how big the canvas is about eight by ten it's about the size of a piece of paper
00:47:17.380um it is a canvas and it's got it's her fingers like finger painting that she's taken purple and
00:47:25.420like like gone across the to make the tentacles and there's definitely more than eight but it's
00:47:31.340okay because three-year-olds can give octopi as many likes and there's like a blue circle in the
00:47:37.660middle which i assume is the head and then there's some blue streaks and like there's like black
00:47:44.420streaks around and yeah and it says for auntie jasmine happy birthday octopus by penny pearl
00:47:51.960because her middle name's pearl so yeah art um i also have my three god daughters they're older
00:47:59.060now but um i have their footprints my friend did their their footprints on canvas when they were
00:48:05.600born so I have that but um I think for me music is more of an influence like I love visual art I
00:48:14.100love the art of like Frida Kahlo and um Vincent Van Van Hoch um I think because I I tend to
00:48:24.420connect with artists that are neurodivergent who you know chronic illness who live with pain who
00:48:30.340live with mental illness um because I for me when I'm at my worst it's really hard to want to create
00:48:40.240anything and there's something about people still being able to create or they create because0.74
00:48:50.000they're at their worst they feel at their worst that I just it gives me hope that like things can
00:48:57.920still be made when you're feeling really low even though not all of us can make the things there's
00:49:02.100still people who can make the things like Frida lying in her bed in a full body cast like painting
00:49:09.240the cast because she had to do something like that's you for me I would probably just lie there
00:49:14.020and cry about it um you know um a couple weeks ago I was like in a pretty bad depressive state
00:49:23.200and my spouse handed me a lump of clay and uh so I'd make something with this and I was gonna
00:49:31.960make a bowl I'm holding it up now it's like gray air dry you know dust clay I was gonna make a bowl
00:49:38.840and the bowl just got flatter and flatter and flatter I said okay it's an ashtray that's fine
00:49:43.740and I wish that I could like treat my own state of mind the same way that I treated that lump of
00:49:49.440clay of like oh it's flat today okay it's not a bowl it's an ashtray anyway you made you made me
00:49:55.480think about that yeah and i like with music so i have synesthesia so i see color visualizations
00:50:01.120when i hear like people's voices like amy your voice is like so rich it's got like the it's like
00:50:08.020the the deepest purple you can think of and then there's these like flex like every time i hear the
00:50:15.140podcast you get these flecks of like blood red and I don't know why that is like people always
00:50:20.800ask is that a good thing the colors don't have a moral significance it's just how my brain goes
00:50:25.760and Risa your voice is like a dandelion yellow and like just and there's like yeah so it's almost
00:50:33.560like there's winter Amy you're the winter and Risa's like the summer it's like I don't know
00:50:38.220how to explain it but that it's like the perfect combo um that's so cool yeah like right now it's
00:50:46.400like so yellow I'm always like Reese's voice is so yellow I also just wanted to let you know that
00:50:51.780you could maybe have a little side hustle going because there are like many several people in the
00:50:56.340chat who want to know what color their voice is maybe maybe this could be something you take on
00:51:02.840as a commission basis so people can find out what color their voices are every time deb i hear your
00:51:09.540voice i see like uh moss green with like silver and i so i just want to shout out to deb because
00:51:18.360i hear deb a lot and i'm like it's that it's the moss green silver like a river i don't know how
00:51:24.780to explain it but yeah it's like if i was a painter maybe i could paint them out but like
00:51:29.940i'm trying to describe but yeah if people want to know i get like yeah it's interesting what that
00:51:36.420is that's the moon and the tree the moon and the tree moon in the tree i love even conceptually
00:51:44.520notionally the idea of synesthesia you know like it's a completely different way of understanding
00:51:50.520the universe and it like i don't have it so it's really exciting to me yeah people always say what's
00:51:57.680it like I was like well it's like how November is Thursday and also navy blue you know
00:52:04.920yeah but yeah like if people want to video chat me it's I could yeah it's fun
00:52:12.900thank you so much Joss we love you how about Tannis I know you are a maker a butcher a baker
00:52:21.320a candlestick maker no it's funny when you mentioned art I remember as a little kid you
00:52:29.060know you want to get messy you want to do the things but my mom was always such a neat freak
00:52:32.900and she always wanted everything needs to be clean everything needs to be whereas when I
00:52:38.300had my own kids I was like nope not doing this they get the play-doh they get the paint we cover
00:52:45.460the table and newspaper, do what you want to do. And as you said, I was like, so my goal for this
00:52:52.640new moon was to finish my wand. And when I was in Salem, a very beautiful lady in one of the shops
00:52:59.760said, the tools that you make yourself mean the most. So I was like, okay, my wand, I'm going to
00:53:06.940make, I'm going to make. So here I am sitting with my dust from my stick that I found in the forest,
00:53:13.620and I've started my wand can you please give us a visual description of your dust and stick
00:53:20.860my dust is just whittled wood bits of all the bark and the little bits that I didn't want on
00:53:27.580the on there on top of my journal which is a new thing that I started and I draw in my journal I
00:53:34.260doodle I you know take notes for your meetings so that's another form of my own artwork I'm not
00:53:41.620you know I feel like our parents don't always do us the service and give us the freedom to do what
00:53:49.380we want and being able to overcome that I think that's important and that's a lot of art itself
00:53:56.220it's just overcoming those adversities that you've had in your life and then my wand is like a bendy
00:54:03.120wand it's going to be a thyrsis wand so I have a pine cone that I'm going to put on top of it
00:54:11.520so it's it's going to be a thing I'm working on it it's happening um but I want to say music
00:54:19.040music for me has always been uh like in my heart I'm one of those people that when I hear like
00:54:25.920a certain song or a certain thing that really touches me I get goosebumps everywhere and you
00:54:32.620feel it like inside of you it's all the way coming out and I think um that's also but but
00:54:39.260when I went to the Louvre with my dad he's like okay we're gonna do this but he's like we're
00:54:45.820gonna do this really quickly because that's my dad didn't want to go through everything and go
00:54:49.760look at everything so I don't know if anybody knows the movie but I remember watching it as
00:54:54.540a teenager and I've been trying to google it and I've tried to look it up but there's a movie
00:54:58.380where there's three young French people um two boys and a girl and they run through the Louvre
00:55:07.800and that's their thing and I don't remember if it was a French movie or English movie I watched
00:55:12.300it as a teenager and that's what it felt like I was doing and it just felt like I was recreating
00:55:18.800that moment with my dad and that's something I'm never gonna forget but um I'm like you I go to
00:55:25.600to art galleries like every city I go to I've tried to go to an art gallery in that city
00:55:30.180um i just think it's it's fun to see what the people of that place find important what they
00:55:38.280consider art um but in montreal we had that graffiti art museum i don't know if you've ever
00:55:44.920been to it um i love graffiti art i have two paintings oops i don't want to on my wall
00:55:52.520um well not paintings sorry the recreations but they're of graffiti from graffiti artists one is
00:55:59.840a woman with her head tilted back with a bird on her shoulder she has three eyes and her other eye
00:56:06.800is the montreal symbol with a flower around it um and the other one is a panther a black panther
00:56:14.800and it's funny you mentioned black panther earlier a black panther going through a gold forest
00:56:20.520and um when i saw them i knew i had to have them and you know there's another artist called hate
00:56:27.400copy which I actually really loved as well because she brought South Asian culture and she was from
00:56:35.240here and me growing up here not having that around me you know as a child um that was also very
00:56:42.520important to me so just taking my whole world melding it into one little all these beautiful
00:56:49.360things yes it's so amazing to me that you know we're on zoom so we can see into your home into
00:56:57.700the homes of you know everyone who's here who has their camera on and almost everybody you know you
00:57:04.160can see if you can see enough of their room you can find a piece of art oh for sure it's so much
00:57:10.860of our lives it's so much of our lives but it's like yeah for me um art and witchcraft and
00:57:18.440everything is about getting messy getting into it and like feeling it like with your hands and your
00:57:26.520soul and everything so yeah those two are very much interlinked for sure yeah and maybe that's
00:57:33.680why you know like um religion has this notion about purity and cleanliness and order and
00:57:41.820stacking all of the angels in a neat row in all of the pews and you know we've seen this
00:57:47.880represented in art too right like the chaos the chaos of demons and the order of of angels right
00:57:56.160if if anybody has been to florence there's that one church in florence um and the ceiling is like
00:58:04.440the descent into hell and i remember standing there in the middle just staring at it for like
00:58:10.600how long and i'm sure i didn't even catch all of it in the time i was there but
00:58:43.740you know we're still unpacking or i feel like we've just moved from minnesota and
00:58:49.260my family's here in connecticut where i am and still you know have maybe one 50th of our
00:58:58.680belongings and some things yes got rolled up and those things got tucked in places in the car and
00:59:06.260found little niches and things but um really not much has been unpacked and nothing's really
00:59:13.000on the walls and it still doesn't quite feel like home and i need to do that but i just
00:59:20.660i have been in the funk myself and it's it's been really difficult to do things let alone
00:59:29.480you know sometimes literally get up so you know um but for artists well actually first i'll say
00:59:39.880is that the apartment that we do have faces kind of east and so we finally have light we have
00:59:49.940sunlight my last apartment we didn't have much light you were facing we were facing um north
00:59:58.080ish and you know living in the north ish and I'm a plant person and um so I'm just so the windows
01:00:08.760are you know come down to like lower shins so i just you know i'm so i can't wait to plant i can't
01:00:17.240wait to get in the dirt and plant and you know and um but i i went to school for photography
01:00:24.820and um you know i was very lucky that my high school had a photography program and
01:00:31.580I remember just like when I first was in the dark room and, you know, of course, when you first see an image come up, you know, out of that and the developer, you know, like really like the first, first time.
01:00:49.860sort of like there's a first time for a lot of things that there's just only the first time
01:00:54.400and just how magical that seemed that you know of course it was the silver halide crystals you know
01:01:03.060doing their thing but um and then going through that into the developer and it's slimy you know
01:01:09.800and just or the the stop in the the different you know things and um but anyways so um
01:01:19.380with that though and i realized that the artists i was thinking and writing down0.98
01:01:25.740are um dead white ladies or identified as female so i was like damn i don't want only dead white0.93
01:01:37.360ladies on my on my paper and i can think of other people but you know and i was like okay i'm aware0.98
01:01:42.940of that. But, um, you know, Carolee Sheman, um, and I just saw that she had passed is, um, of
01:01:51.420interior scroll is, um, you know, performance artists, you know, of, of, of, you know, using
01:01:58.900her body and like physically, um, standing, you know, in her without any clothes and having an
01:02:08.040on curling, you know, a piece of long, thin paper
01:02:27.880And so, of course it is, but of bearing oneself,
01:02:32.880self truly bearing oneself and not not for shock value not not for but sort of like you know
01:02:47.620pretend i'm shaking the fear do you can hear me do you hear me yes yeah and um
01:02:54.400yeah yeah there's so much that's like shock for shock value and it's like whatever clickbait and
01:03:02.120then there's like I'm trying to provoke something ideally a thought yeah and this is how how I'm
01:03:10.680going to do that yeah I don't want my art to ever be not my art but the art that I consume to ever
01:03:15.580be safe yeah and that was um some of her very early work I think you know in her like late 20s
01:03:23.860you know, early twenties, late twenties. So, you know, um, and, um, she said some other things,
01:03:31.180but as, um, I just looked that piece up. That was 1975. And boldy, but a goody. So badass.
01:03:41.380Yeah. And I, I, I later on when I, when I was like 23 up in Portland, Maine, I saw she was
01:03:49.180teaching at one of the local art schools and I went to a lecture with her and it was just you
01:03:55.300know it was very interesting it's interesting also being able to work with people that you've
01:04:02.600um inspired you I'll say inspired um but um Rachel had put in the in the chat about
01:04:15.260um wadsworth academia and uh i grew up in connecticut and i um one of my first jobs
01:04:25.160was at the wadsworth color correcting uh for the calendars and things and pieces that you know
01:04:32.820everyone wants to post and everybody would get oh so i do i have memory issues so as many of you
01:04:40.460know um with my stuff is everyone got the um the georgia o'keefe i don't remember if it was
01:04:51.580it was something tree and everyone got that piece it's very kind of abstract they got it the wrong
01:04:57.880direction at the wrong color and i can because i could i can look at things and i can say plus two
01:05:04.860minus three cyan you know and that's kind of the way my brain and color thinks um but there's an
01:05:13.740exhibit there um by Janine Antonini um who um in one of the smaller um galleries that was a piece
01:05:24.800that she did and I didn't get to see her but I got to see it at the end and it was called Loving Care
01:05:29.280and she used her hair with hair dye and she mopped the whole floor with her head with her long hair0.57
01:05:40.000as her paintbrush with you know whatever hair dye you know in terms of what you know am i don't know0.99
01:05:49.360lots of different things um that could be said about that but
01:05:53.480both you know those are very clearly physical things and just those are pieces that really
01:06:05.960have spoken to me and and yeah thank you thank you so much Jess I know you have many things to
01:06:13.700say on this subject thank you so much for coming how are you doing tell us about the world of art
01:06:20.740I'm so excited. I'm going to just spread the good word of the artist that made me want to become an artist. So it was a beautiful day in early 90s Saskatchewan.
01:06:34.200and my parents took me to the Mendel Art Gallery and on display was work by a Métis artist called
01:06:43.280Edward Patra and he had taken bones and reassembled them into a sculpture of a coyote
01:06:56.360and it was in the middle of the gallery and I was like four and I was like this is
01:07:00.940the greatest thing I've seen in my life and I booked it and I touched that sculpture and got
01:07:06.720yelled at by a security guard okay I literally have to walk around galleries with my hands
01:07:14.560clasped behind my back because I want to touch everything yeah and oh man and ever since then
01:07:22.540like his work is he uses portals and the coyote to kind of set up this this space of being in
01:07:31.100between and this liminal space and um kind of like this own personal power to transform things
01:07:39.140and he will go into a gallery space and just absolutely transform it into something else
01:07:47.640and he yeah he I saw his work when I was four and I knew I wanted to be an artist from that moment
01:07:55.120on like it was the most potent magic I'd ever seen in my life and I didn't know what magic was
01:08:01.740at that point in time um so yeah Edward Patra just absolutely the greatest and then my other
01:08:13.060artist that made me want to become an artist was my Oma. She was a displaced person from East
01:08:23.580Prussia and came to Saskatchewan after the Second World War in the 50s and she covered the walls of
01:08:32.860their farmhouse in murals in oil paint depicting what she could reimagine East Prussia and Germany
01:08:41.380looking like and kind of like filling this farmhouse and it's abandoned now and but those
01:08:47.120murals are still there and it was it these two artists together introduced me to this idea of
01:08:55.340like that art can make can give you the power to reimagine the past and the present and future and
01:09:00.820so now when I'm making my own art it's constantly I'm constantly thinking about how maybe I'm
01:09:08.000affecting the past through my work every single thing i do is a spell it's a ritual it's a magical
01:09:13.400object and i feel like the the divine intervention of my oma and edward patra just kind of set me on
01:09:19.660that track almost immediately so yeah i love that intersection i love that intersection so much and
01:09:30.540and i've i've seen some of your work you made a short film that um you shared with us and it's
01:09:36.760amazing. With your permission, we'll put it in the show notes for this episode. And
01:09:41.980so you're like a multimedia artist. So how do you choose from moment to moment,
01:09:49.120from piece to piece, like what, how the message is going to materialize?
01:09:53.960Um, yeah, for me, the medium is always secondary to what I want to communicate as an artist.
01:10:02.060So I like to work with the medium that's going to work the best. I also love working in abandoned properties, quote unquote properties. I love challenging the idea of ownership and real estate through that colonial lens that we've grown up with, using ritual and witchcraft to subvert that.
01:10:23.760So if I'm maybe thinking about that, perhaps an abandoned house is where I want to go to.
01:10:30.500But if I'm making more personal work about my own journey as a witch, a lot of the time I really do love using paint for that.
01:10:39.260It's very meditative and lots of sigils and symbols find their way into it, which is a lot of fun.