<div><div dir="auto">Technological interferences from mercury in retrograde shouldn’t prevent us from enjoying Caitlin Rose Sweet’s introduction. </div></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Caitlin Rose Sweet</strong> <span dir="auto"><<a href="mailto:caitlinrosesweet@gmail.com">caitlinrosesweet@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 11:26 AM<br>Subject: my intro piece<br>To: Lissette Olivares <<a href="mailto:liolivares@fulbrightmail.org">liolivares@fulbrightmail.org</a>><br></div><br><br><div dir="ltr"><span id="m_7032973725772962362gmail-docs-internal-guid-d44f0053-7fff-6950-484c-4006e66eeeaf"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Hey y'all I've been enjoying all the intersecting threads of dialogue. I am Caitlin Rose Sweet, daughter of a midwife and craft artist who was born in the rolling hills of Appalachia (Osage Land). I live in Brooklyn (Lenape Land) and beginning my transition to living in the Catskill Mountains (Mohican Land). I am a working craft artist, I make ceramic ritual vessels to enhance practices of self care and resistance. For the last few years my work has been focused on cannabis smoking pipes, i see cannabis as a way to create temporal rifts in the constructed liner space of the patriarchy. My smoking vessels are sex and body positive and are tools for queer babes to get high and feel themselves. Recently I have been shifting to larger ritual object such as chalices and altar pieces. </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">I am invested in talking about my art practice as craft because craft has embodied in it a certain class politic and open relationship to the body. Craft sees the skilled hand as a thinking hand, one that gathers information from the repetitive intentional contact with the material and the world at large. How one touches and what they touch informs how they make. As a queer person my hands are sites of political resistance and sexual pleasure, making my ceramics infused with my sexuality and political dissent. I use my lived experience with queer collectivity and abundance to counter homophobic narratives that the queer life is a lonely life. I’m expressing what happens when queer bodies come together, the sensation of the singular body becoming the collective body. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">        </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-right:45pt;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">My practice is entanglement of feminism, queer theory and decorative art. I focus on how domestic objects create and maintain cultural identity throughout time. Ceramics is archival material and I think about my work as recording the affect of queer life that will serve as future artifacts.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-right:45pt;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">I explore failure as a generative space to radically reimagine bodies, femininity, and ceramic practices. I am constantly poking holes into social constructs of what constitutes a good body and proper craft techniques. My work is messy, this sloppy craft is an expression of my refusal to assimilate. It speaks of a matrix of haptic knowledge rather than the mastery of traditional objects with fixed and inevitable functions. </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">The term </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-style:italic;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">ruderal </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">is new to me, as an earth and void witch i love how plants can come into spaces wrecked by humanity. My partner and I recently bought a home with 8 acres of land in Cairo, NY. The land was turned into farmland by the colonializers, the large farm was broken up into smaller plots with the highway was built. Then in the 90’s a severe storm took down about half of the trees, the previous owner (an ex cop and conservative republican local politician) harvest some of the fallen trees for firewood but left most of it to rot in the woods. Most significantly he did not replant any trees. He just created about 3 acres of lawn. And now i am process of preparing to slowly replant the woods and turn the lawn into a meadow and a series of small gardens. Though our place is not an actual waste land it feels like an emotional wasted space. The whole american obsession with the perfect monocrop of “yard” and how it represents being middle class and controling the natural world. I am seeing this “rewilding” as a labor of duty to restore this suburban wasteland into a thriving ecosystem. A way to make mends, to be of service to the land that has been exploited and neglected. I am not approaching the land as a resource for me, like what plants can I grow to feed me but seeing myself as a resource for the land. What does this ground need to thrive? What plants do the songbirds need for food and shelter? </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Currently the word witch is have a trendy moment, which in some ways is amazing but also leaves me with some guarded skepticism. I grew up in a time and place that it was unsafe to talk about any spiritual practice that wasn’t christianity. Coming from a Jewish family was enough, but being a self proclaimed teenage witch was a no go. So I have and always will be a lone witch who is actually very private about my actual practices and deities served. I do believe that being a witch is an acknowledgement of the Multiverse and the existences of energies that move between and through all things. If is also a stance of politician resistance. Witches are not well behaved and operate outside of cultural law. </span></p></span><br></div>
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