ARTIST STATEMENT
How is Grief held when words fail us? How can we connect if we no longer speak our ancestral language? Art as Ceremony has allowed me exploration and grounding through Symbology, stories and song – finding new meaning in Old Ways still very much alive within and without. Creating my own practice, a craft, a prayer, is my own personal theater to express loss, pain, abandonment, and many other devastations of severance and systemic erasure of culture, as well as familiar mythologies of survival. I am my Ancestors just as I am a dream of my children’s future. And our future is Indigenous.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Siyo, I am Andi. I am a surrogate-created, adopted, queer, gender theorist, artist, activist, and parent. I am a citizen of Cherokee Nation and have Eastern Band Cherokee and Creek, as well as Ashkenazi and European Ancestry. Art helps me explore my relationship to the world as Other, and as intimate partner abuse survivor, as well as a neurodivergent, adopted person, and reconnecting Native. I am self taught and enjoy most mediums, though mostly work with pen and ink, watercolor, and film photography.
© Andi Linden