For me, the process of creating feels like grappling through the dark after losing electricity. Suddenly, to find my way, I can’t rely on the well-grooved paths of knowing that had become so familiar I didn’t even know I depended on them to get around. My maps become useless because I can no longer access the senses I used to read them.

Sense-making and unmaking are the structural supports in my work. The dissolution of knowledge that occurs through following the nonsensical becomes its own form of knowing. The worlds that I create are almost recognizable, yet slightly altered in a way that disorients just enough to see the ordinary with extraordinary vision. Simultaneously, this becomes a fight for the unseen. To give body to the invisible, what is assumed to not exist simple because it is not apparent within the dominant narrative of existance, is a point of transmutation that I look for in my work.

My faith in following intelligences outside the narrow vision of dominant culture has been influenced by Neurodiversity thought, Queer theory, and the many BIPOC voices that are leading the way towards decolonization and collective liberation. My commitment is to let myself unravel in the process of making art, as well as in the continuation of that process that occurs in the exchange between the inner and outer worlds that my art attempts to bridge.

-Raven (they/them)