“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”
When I came back to San Francisco in March, the entire city shut down. I couldn’t go to my studio so I spent a few days creating a makeshift art space in my living room. What to do now?
Feeling stuck, I picked up a book; they’ve always been my go-to in times of stress. In college, I wanted to be part of Gertrude Stein’s salon of writers and artists whose works inspired each other.
My latest work, Propagate 1, is currently showing at Arts Benicia in their Get The Message: Words and Images show, specifically focused on how words inform art. Propagate 1 was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s text, The Word for World is Forest.
Her novella critiques the teleology of interstellar imperialism (white patriarchal saviorism) as a “killer story,” one that overlooks or erases “life stories.” The text urges for an acknowledgement of the indelible effect of violence as well as decentering human supremacy.
“...the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
From Le Guin, I revisited Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisen. Climate change, which represents the existential crises of our generation, is integral to Jemisen’s work. Other speculative feminists in different fields, like Donna Haraway and Anne L.Tsing, have contributed to a lifetime of studies that aim to decenter human supremacy and see the sublime in nature.
When I read their works, I see visual patterns and colors in my head - deep green forests, dark blue oceans and the small pockets of light that dot damaged forests. This process leads to the development of abstract patterns in my works.
Here is my complete spring to summer reading list:
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word For World Is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Octavia Butler, The Parable of The Sower
N.K. Jemisen, The Broken Earth Trilogy, Killing Moon, Shadowed Sun
Donna Haraway, Staying With The Trouble
Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom At The End Of The World
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss
Any books by speculative feminists you would add?