The Birthday Project

The Birthday Project is a life long art project and accompanying rituals. When I turned 30 I realized I was about to live longer than Sylvia Plath, one of the first poets to light my brain and heart on fire. My 20s had been largely a trial by fire and my 30s felt like a new horizon - I felt like I had only started to understand my crafts and myself as an artist. And I mourned the work of Plath we lost with her death. I took that grief and finished a piece I had started in undergrad using her poem "Elm".

During that year I couldn't shake how memorializing Plath and her lost work also was an act of gratitude for my own life and the work I still had ahead of me. I decided to give myself a project that would last as long as my own life and would honor my art ancestors. Each year on the eve of my birthday, I create a ritual wherein I meet a female or trans or nonbinary artist who died at the age I am about to depart. I meditate on their lives, their work, their transitions into death and incorporate them into a solitary ritual of gratitude for another year on this plane. I spend whatever time I can in that next year (and often others after) creating a piece around that ancestor. It is a way for me to be in the midst of the life cycle: to grow something from the death of a beloved.

As someone who has an ongoing and complicated relationship to their own chronic health challenges, especially my c-PTSD and autoimmune disorder, this practice is often as much a preservation of my own life as it is one that seeks to contribute to the legacies of these artists.

Art on the left is the painting "Birthday" by Dorothea Tanning.

11:04

Birthday Project 31: Being Here is Everything: Workshop

Paula Modersohn-Becker was an early Expressionist painter, the first known female artist to paint nude self portraits, and the dear friend of sculptor Clara Westhoff and poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Modersohn-Becker died at the age of 31 after being put on extended bedrest after giving birth to her daughter, Mathilde - a wholly avoidable death. Modersohn-Becker used her self portraits as acts of radical imagining of herself. This piece uses a mirror to bring the act of self portraiture to the performance space and is a reflection on the auto/biographical narratives of the artist. The recorded text is Rilke's "Requiem For a Friend" written for Paula.

09:37

Birthday Project 30: Seance for Sylvia

Unfortunately documentation of the original "Elm" doesn't exist but I hope to recreate it someday soon. Here is Seance for Sylvia, a piece I made during the week of Samhain (Halloween) in 2020 during the COVID19 pandemic.