[-empyre-] Caitlin Rose Sweet

[Lissette Olivares]

Technological interferences from mercury in retrograde shouldn’t prevent us
from enjoying Caitlin Rose Sweet’s introduction.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Caitlin Rose Sweet <caitlinrosesweet at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 11:26 AM
Subject: my intro piece
To: Lissette Olivares <liolivares at fulbrightmail.org>


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.

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.

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.

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.

The term ruderal 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?

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.
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