flesh, dexterity & storms

as a black woman artist existing at the intersection of white supremacist ideology, identity, patriarchy and capitalism my flesh is constantly being projected onto by the subconsciousness of those who around me. there’s often a potent mix of desire and hate, even with those closest to me who may believe they ‘love’ me. what is ‘love’ in the moment in history we all find ourselves in?

what does it mean to love someone whose humanity a society has historically struggled to recognise outside the conditions of ownership, utility, service and control? what does it mean to be loved by people whose understanding of love may still be shaped by the very systems that diminish you?

and what does it mean to love when the imagination of the person loving you has not yet caught up with the reality of who you are?

who are we within systems that were never designed with us in mind, but that continue to reproduce the conditions of our subjugation? what does it mean to inhabit a body that has been historically imagined as property? property of the master. property of the state. a body whose autonomy has repeatedly been contested, negotiated and denied. what does it mean to attempt to belong to yourself within such a history?

i am interested in the distance between being permitted to exist and being permitted to define the terms of your own existence. between being visible and being understood. between being celebrated for what you produce and being recognised in the fullness of who you are. these distinctions matter. they matter in our intimate relationships, in our cultural institutions, in our workplaces and in the ways we understand one another. they matter in the stories we tell about success, and in who gets to determine when somebody has arrived.

it is a peculiar thing to be thirteen years into my career as a filmmaker, writer and artist, and still, at times, be treated as though i am emerging. emerging from what? and from where, exactly? i find myself repeatedly having to reintroduce myself. to explain who i am, what i do, and who i am not. to make visible a body of work and a cultural practice that should, by now, speak for themselves. there is something exhausting about the perpetual demand to establish your existence on terms that others can readily comprehend. multifaceted cultural practice confounds algorithms. it confounds institutions. it confounds people.

we inhabit a culture that rewards specialisation in ways that can become prescriptive: choose a lane, establish a niche, make yourself legible, become a recognisable product. give people a neat category in which to place you, and they may find it easier to understand how to value you. but what happens when the practice itself depends on movement between disciplines? when filmmaking informs writing, writing informs art, art informs theology, and theology transforms the way you understand culture? what happens when the connections between these things are not distractions from the work, but the work itself? i am not interested in amputating parts of my practice to make myself easier to categorise.

i know that there are ways i could make myself more legible to the systems through which professional recognition and material success are distributed. i might be safer, richer, or more conventionally successful if i committed myself to a single, neatly packaged identity. if i made myself easier to market. if i learned to separate the parts of myself that institutions know how to reward from the parts they find difficult to accommodate. but what would that separation cost me? and what, precisely, would i be gaining? at this edge, i find myself returning to questions that are not merely professional or cultural, but spiritual, philosophical and religious.

to borrow from arnold mindell, i am interested in the edge: the place where the familiar ends, where the boundaries of what we know are tested, and where crossing requires something of us. for me, the question is not simply whether i can inhabit multiple disciplines, identities or ways of knowing. it is whether i am willing to remain faithful to the fullness of that practice when doing so comes at a material cost. my relationship with god is central to how i understand this question.

there is a difference between knowing about god and cultivating a relationship with the living god that informs how you move through the world. there is a difference between professing faith when the path is comfortable and remaining present when obedience leads you somewhere that offers no immediate material reassurance.

i have been thinking about the people who can remain in the storm because they understand that the presence of god is not contingent on the absence of difficulty. if the presence of the living god is in the storm, and not present within the seemingly safe, disaster-free land beyond it, then what do you choose? for me, his presence trumps material comfort. this does not mean that suffering is inherently virtuous or necessary, that danger should be romanticised, or that material security has no value. it means that neither comfort nor conventional success can be the ultimate authority over my life. but it is a decisive moment.

these are precisely the moments when the spiritually faithful choice may appear irrational within a framework that understands the world primarily through material gain, institutional approval and measurable outcomes.

there are moments when the refusal to pursue a particular opportunity, inhabit a particular identity, or make yourself available for a particular kind of recognition will look like self-sabotage to those who cannot see what is informing the decision. but what if the terms of the calculation are incomplete and reductionist?

what if a life cannot be adequately understood through the metrics of wealth, visibility, status and professional advancement? what if the question is not simply what i can gain by making myself more acceptable to a system, but what i might lose by allowing that system to determine the limits of who i can become?

when your life is not your own in the ultimate sense, but god’s, the choices you make will not always be legible to those who recognise only material outcomes. and perhaps they are not supposed to be.