Textile Transformations

How does the construction of desire/manufactured consent (fast fashion) render our imaginations and our sense of compassion impotent, inhibiting our capacity to think, to breathe, dream, and to act in the face of climate chaos? My self-portrait fibershed/supply-chain consciousness images, antidotes to inbred apathy implicit in fast fashion and mass materialism, are central to my new book Radical Art in Action: Unlearning What We Think We Know (Vernon Press, 2026). Fibershed/supply-chain consciousness is rooted in cooperative action: only by understanding how all forms of oppression are interconnected can we understand that all forms of emancipation are equally interconnected. My visual narratives as webs of local-global, eco-personal-political sense-making, hopefully ignite a sensorial relationality in the face of status quo normalcy. This work can help activate a biosynergistic, climate resilient, cultural paradigm transformation.

Body Harvest, SOUL Space #44
Permaculture Apple Orchard, Paonia, Colorado Characters in my images (in this case, myself) become hybrids of machine and animal that populate dream-like worlds. Through hyperbolic, carnal visual language, these polymorphic bodies engage in enigmatic ceremonies—the body becomes a membrane between sensuality and restraint, surrender and resistance, explicit purpose and the unexpected. My images illuminate a call-and-response between anxiety and beauty: anxiety in the moment of recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar (the other often seen as grotesque); beauty in the moment of responsiveness to our undeniable connectedness (the fertility of uncanny congruencies). Here I adorn myself in luminescent, gossamer tulle and chrome bubble wrap packing materials-suffocating yet seductive. In collaboration with my community’s fiber farmers, upcyclers, and weavers, I dance with their materials in a variety of regenerative agriculture landscapes like this permaculture biodynamic apple orchard. Many of our supplies come from S.O.U.L. (Shared Opportunity Used Local) Commons, the free store I began two years ago. S.O.U.L. supports mutual aid relationships and gift economies. Oikos/”eco,” the Greek for home, is the root of both eco-logy and eco-nomics. S.O.U.L. as collective home, an economy of care, diverts dozens of tons of goods/textiles from the waste stream, shifts consumer-convenience culture, provides upcycling education through Skills Share, and creates networks of care for disaster relief from fires, hurricanes, floods.

Body Harvest, SOUL Space Umbilical 3
Permaculture Apple Orchard, Paonia, Colorado Bound by my stepfather’s 1970s welder’s mask, I am photographing myself “unraveling” in our community organic apple orchard. Hemmed in by their agriculturally-imposed linearity, I improvise with the trees as they, too, are veiled, bound, protected, distorted by synthetic materials designed to ward off the natural world-again playing/dancing with contradiction. My photo props/costume and umbilical material comes from S.O.U.L. (Shared Opportunity Used Local)–our free store that directly challenges taken-for-granted norms of fast fashion. My monthly programming encourages collective practice of environmental justice and community action. We develop local infrastructures that promote ecological and human health, enact reparative justice, and support local food and farming, arts, and resource use. Skills Share in combination with our Makers’ Space have included fabric mending, sock darning, electronic repairs, energy kinesiology, violin restoration, spinning, felting, pine hydrosol using a copper still, soap making, weaving, rag-rug crocheting, woodworking using local orchard trees, Sashiko (traditional Japanese clothing repair), cordage making (rope from plant fiber and animal sinew), puppet-making, trash tours, Freeganism 101, and, mosaics workshops, and life-skills workshops by visiting Ute elders. S.O.U.L. Commons also includes   community artist workspaces: woodworking, tiny home building, Fibershed education/collective action, stone carving, ethically harvested natural medicine, land skills & ecology education, radical eco-politics and arts library and action-based book club, body-politics & sexuality counseling, Iyengar yoga privates, and a natural dye garden nourished by Alpaca poop. We grow local plants used to dye fibers, paper, and paint.

Immunity 2-Moss Wall
Hambidge Art Residency, Georgia My mouth stuffed with single-use grocery store plastic bags, my body bound by medical gowns (peculiar, synthetic, transparent webbed material), my limbs caught in colorful dense plastics, I dance with an ancient wall–puzzled together rock formations clothed in luscious, heavy moss. Sliding toward me, encroaching as Progress and Development does, are stacks of Science Magazines. Alarm reigns: annually 100 billion pieces of clothing are crafted, the fashion sector stands as the second most polluting entity after the oil business, the fashion industry accounts for 5% to 10% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, the fashion industry uses over 79 trillion liters of water every year, over 2 billion people experience water shortages in 40+ countries, 35% of microplastics found in the ocean result from washing clothes made of synthetic material. Because both my visual and theoretical explorations emphasize the intersection between biodiversity and cultural diversity, self-portraits within these environments explore symbiotic natural-world models that can provoke the possibility of transitioning from anthropocentrism and environmental racism to a social permaculture. I use my photographs to elicit deep attention to what already exists—an attunement to our interrelationships with the non-human world.

Petroleum Cocoon, Moss Stairs
Hambidge Art Residency, Georgia gravity, complicity

The Spectacle of the Invisible, Kiln
Hambidge Art Residency, Georgia  Struggling for light, for breath, I emerge from a kiln. Kilns are intended to bake-heat earth, transform earth into vessel, but my own vessel is plastic-coated. By juxtaposing my body (body fragments) with organic and synthetic materials and environments, I play with the illusory distinctions between “them and us:” the familiar and the unfamiliar, what is supposedly comfortable and what puts us on edge. Once we begin to disentangle the roots of the Anthropocene, we can begin to collectively inhabit the intermedial in order to fully live the fertility of our interdependency. My aim is to amplify the fertility of the in-between integral to our more-than-human pluriverse. As a Sephardic, Arab-Jewish woman emerging from the ovens, I inscribe the morcellated body with unresolvable questions; I fragment it in order to expand and expose the body-mind. My ancestral lineage guides my Diasporic writing-with-light, my photography-justice practice.

Photosynthetic Apocalypse of the Familiar
Hambidge Art Residency, Georgia A fairytale of silent syncopations, my veiled head, torso, limbs reimagine a biosynthetic future rooted in ancient earth-based technologies. We have confused Apocalypse with Armageddon. Unlike Armageddon, a battle between “good” and “evil,” apocalypse refers to revelation. Apocalypse is a process of unveiling. “Apocalypse of the Familiar” is not referring to an end of the familiar, but an ongoing revealing of what we take for granted in dominator-cultures. Unveiling is a process of recognizing what we choose to ignore and what we choose to see—to remember. For example, the tags on our clothes tell us exactly how we are complicit in the garment-industry. Here I dance with the First Law of Thermodynamics. Re-membering energy transformation; energy is never lost, simply transformed. Every gesture offers the potential for individual empowerment leading to collective agency that can re-configure our relationship to fibers, raw materials, our local and global supply chains, economies of scale. As I dance with this law, I re-member that consumers are capitalism. We are simultaneously the micro and the macro. This self-portrait explores the collision between our natural environment/more-than-human ecosystems (worlds not mediated through industrial capitalism), the play of human creativity (such as aesthetic forms like music) and human-body vulnerability. Swallowed by nature and digested through a cinematic sense of the absurd, my body performs collective creative risk-taking.

Photosynthetic Jurassic Apocalypse 4
Triangle Lake Rudolf Steiner Conference Center We are all bioelectrical beings. We are all biosynthetic beings. In our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-world, our collusion with corporate and imperial forms of domination sustains our techno-euphoric race into a sanitized, hyper-electrified future. My intention is to disrupt the distinction between the interior and exterior of both psychological and physical experiences. Although I am a photographer, I don’t see my work as strictly photographic, but as sculptural, performative, cinematic. I develop my photographic scenarios by finding natural and architectural sites that I juxtapose to human gestures and psychological states. I then choreograph narratives within these environments. Although the photographs are consciously constructed, the relationships are born out of an improvised collaboration in which the physics of touch, gravity, and balance establish an unfolding performance.

Photosynthetic Apocalypse Mirror Boundary 8 22
Hambidge Art Residency, Georgia When we recognize that consumers are capitalism, we can recognize both our complicity and our agency to make radical change in the fashion industry. Mirror boundaries of potential self-reflection are often so distorted, we live in denial that our constructed desires are saturated in the blood of others-whether unethical working conditions, unfair wages in apparel businesses and clothing stores, or hazardous substances in our garments. Collaborating with oneself challenges the tyranny of modernity, subverting the violence of transparent representability that easily digestible taxonomies reify. Paralleling Kristeva’s definition of the abject as an uncanny disturbance of refusing binary codes (such as margin / center, complete / incomplete, composition / decomposition, ego / other, inside / outside, the familiar / unfamiliar), my photographs highlight queer ecologies-coalitionality-interconnectivity—the private as it seeps into the public. We are the stranger.

Body Harvest SOUL Space #84
Permaculture Apple Orchard, Paonia, Colorado  Globally, 2025 is projected to be the dryest year in recorded history This is one reason I choose to photograph my subjects in complex agricultural spaces. 95 million tons of textiles are generated each year. The garment industry is responsible for 20% of global water waste. The process of turning raw materials into textiles can use 8000+ synthetic chemicals. One major chemical-culprit in clothing manufacturing is chemical dye. Around 20% of all global water pollution comes from dyeing textiles. The water used to apply chemicals and dye fabrics is often dumped into rivers and other waterways. Since synthetic fabrics (polyester, nylon) are made from petroleum plastic, when they begin to break down, they create toxic microplastics that spread through our water ecosystems. Cotton is also very problematic. Growing cotton is extremely water-intensive. Producing one cotton shirt can take up to 2700 liters of water, which is enough water for one person to drink for 2 ½ years. Revealing the hysteria of taking for granted these biocidal, ecocidal norms, I photograph the interplay between the synthetic and the natural. Even organic/artificial is not a clean-cut boundary. When I utilize photography props gleaned from medical facilities (one of the most extreme international polluters) in relation to used objects that come from S.O.U.L. (Shared Opportunity Used Local) Commons (the free store I began two years ago) I offer an alternative language to explore industry-waste culture.

Radical Symbiosis, Textile Tyrannies-Lost Valley in the Cube #32
Institute for Creative Art & Technology, The Cube During my visiting scholar artist residency with the Institute for Creative Art and Technology, I projected my photographs on the Cube: an audio/visual immersive performance/installation space. Three suspended, projected images include a woman culling from 59 tons of textiles (many of which are unworn, still with tags) dumped in Chile’s Atacama desert (more than half of which went up in flames in January 2024), a fibershed self-portrait in the post-hurricane Skeleton Beach, and a diptych of an 1800’s textile factory of Jewish immigrant children slave workers in NYC with a 2023 Bangladeshi child working in a slave-labor textile factory. The image projected on the ground is of children in Lost Valley Permaculture Ecovillage where I lived. The children are (playfully) buried in piles of wool shorn from our community sheep. I dance upon this projected image draped in found garments from Y-TOSS, Virginia Tech’s student-led sustainability initiative that has diverted 100 tons of items from landfill. I dance in a Butoh style that is about shedding socio-political skins, another form of garment, of textile. Historically, Butoh attempted to free the body from artifice, rejecting dance as self-expression and drawing inspiration from nature and the imagination, from the crippled and the blind. Butoh is like a Rorschach test. The audience reads their own story in the dancer’s actions. It must be absurd; it is a mirror which potentially thaws fear, the unveiling of our interdependencies.

Radical Symbiosis, Textile Tyrannies-Lost Valley in the Cube-Detail
Institute for Creative Art & Technology, The Cube Detail of floor projection image of children in the Lost Valley Permaculture Ecovillage where I lived and worked. The children are (playfully) buried in massive piles of wool shorn from our community sheep. Wool is the original eco fiber. It is 100% natural, renewable, and biodegradable. No other organic or synthetic fiber can match all of wool’s naturally inherent benefits. Wool is the world’s most recycled fiber apparel. The production (sheep) and disposal (compost) of Wool is biodegradable so it does not contribute to microplastic pollution in our oceans or on our land. When disposed of, wool becomes a fertilizer by gradually releasing valuable nutrients and carbon back into the rich soil. In contrast, the carbon produced in major synthetic apparel, such as polyester or acrylic, is extracted from fossil fuels, de-sequestering carbon stored millions of years ago. Scale is a critical component to this practice. At the farm-scale level, emissions can be offset by rotating pasture species which improves soil quality to increase carbon storage. In this image I am folded in devotional gesture at the head of the child surrounded by glorious, fertile wool. This floor projection is located beneath The Cube, a 3-sided projection screen.

Word Play: The Tears of Things, Text as Textile
Las Vegas In the first series of close-up images of a woman’s upper thighs cradling a variety of objects, I combined symbols of metamorphosis with the following “garments” to both reveal and conceal her body: glass vials with sea sponges, shrimp shells with a duck bill, my grandmother’s dentures from hiding during the Holocaust, analog photo test-strips, bulbous moldy gourd wrapped in green latex gloves with cantaloupe seeds, bats’ heads, glass laboratory vials, preserved pigs’ ears, my fingernail clippings, bird claws and skulls, rusted metal, and multiple mirrors. As we unravel and disentangle the contradictions these tapestries offer, we can begin to utilize those paradoxes to enhance our world’s cultural, biological, and creative diversity. Biosynthetics and unpredictable supply system partners are a great example of how to utilize what may initially seem to be contradictory. Based on controversial audience reactions to these images (often leading to censorship), I wrote the words that are seen here: words from my journals projected across my face, shrouding my face—just as the audience projected their experience on the images. These eco-socio-political-aesthetic concerns are at the heart of my new book, Radical Art in Action: Unlearning What We Think We Know. The video title image comes from two books: The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects and The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Using both books, I weave art, the sacred, and supply-chains.

Mining the Body-Stage 1
Salton Sea, Bombay Beach, California I play at the border of California and Mexico, a nebulous artist colony on the edge of the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. This self-portrait series shot at Bombay Beach includes devastatingly contaminated land, air, and water. Agribusiness, urban “development,” and water tyrannies shape this region through the horrors of human hubris. Speculations claim that the Salton Sea contains the world’s largest lithium deposits—which will lead to catastrophic lithium mining for “green” technologies (batteries for electric vehicles, etc.)The salt-encrusted remains of former resorts (think Frank Sinatra, Sonny Bono) and second homes of Southern California’s elite mingle with strewn art objects (remnants from Burning Man) and discarded equipment from decades of diverting the Colorado River to support agriculture in the desert and atomic bomb testing. Geothermal energy plants, hot springs RV resorts, date palm Big Ag, miles of revegetation recuperation projects collide with the broken town of Bombay Beach—all sitting atop the San Andreas fault and all an ecotourist hot spot. In Stage 1, rebar & barbed wire scaffolding become the Fashion Mannequins; we, human bodies—naked, masked, flaunting elaborate displays of color, become the decoration—manipulated products that “clothe” the desiccated metal bodies while escaping the wild & domesticated “natural” world—also laden with contradictions. For example, an Alaskan malamute in the desert represents displaced domesticity.

Swallowed: Boneyard EcoTourism of the Anthropocene #47 Jekyll Island
Boneyard, Jekyll Island, Georgia In Swallowed: Boneyard EcoTourism of the Anthropocene #47 shot at Jekyll Island, Skeleton Beach, Georgia, I struggle with the ocean current and the wind. I wrap myself in natural, biodegradable, remarkably soothing fibers that visually (not to the touch, only sight) mimic the extraordinarily devastated tree fibers. My body struggles, yearns, and aches with the trees. The textile becomes a bridge between my vulnerable human physical form and the vulnerable tree body-both being devoured by an ocean ripe with the Anthropocene. Additionally, through my dance, I am frenetically taunting the tourists—ranging to about four million per year—all with their smartphones taking selfies among the live oak trees, the marine forest, that have been ravaged by the continual hurricanes. At the same time, I seek audiences who are receptive to satirical cultural critique. Framing my story in the form of performance-based satire allows entry into otherwise potentially overwhelming, confrontational topics; and, as with strategic uses of humor and parable, my subject can be received with greater openness and less fear or resistance. By entering one’s consciousness through the mediated vehicle of somatic and visual storytelling, I hope to surprise my audience—evoking the possibility of reconsidering consequences of one’s habitual daily choices. Swallowed: Boneyard offers a glimpse of one scene from of my extensive cinematic, autoethnography series: www.carajudeaalhadeff.com.

Molten Melting
Creativity & Innovation Design Ctr, Virginia Tech Fatimah Mernissi’s discussion of the veil as a device of agency and not of oppression offers a critical critique on imposing Western monoculture (for example, the ban on the burkha) that attempts to eradicate cultural diversity—in this case, expressed through clothing and fashion. In Beyond the Veil, Mernissi claims that the veil is actually a mechanism of self-empowerment and not submission. Analogously, Judith Butler writes “a veil can mean…a woman’s negotiation between private and public space. It’s about the right to ‘appear’—to appear as who you are—and it’s clear that you need the right to ‘appear’ in order to take part in democratic life. …A real feminism would extend our ‘universal’ principals.’” I shot this series during my visiting scholar artist residency in the Maker’s Space at Virginia Tech’s Creativity and Innovation Design Center. I play with color as veil, light as veil. The moveable, hanging and stretched, synthetic welding curtains of an almost insidious orange that can both protect and suffocate—the both/and, the yes/no. Exploring the eco-socio-political implications of cross-cultural textiles and garments in conjunction with the interplay between organic and synthetic, the natural and artificial, can help us navigate the extreme complexities of our modern world. We can begin to burn off (referring to this image’s title: “Molten Melting”) centuries of misinformation.

Mojacar, Photosynthesis: My precarious everything is almost…
Fundacion Valparaiso What happens when socialized norms are so deeply ingrained in us? In many of my self-portraits I sacrifice my body to being engulfed by plastic, replacing my own skin with petroleum membranes.  My photographs straddle the private and the public, the personal and the political. To me, unveiling through socio-economics, politics, and our infinitely changing natural world is at the core of Textile Transformations. Fortified through the illusion of neutrality, transparency, and purity, behavioral engineering is maintained through our hyper-commodified bodies. In response, I hope to become a catalyst to unravel social values and cultural assumptions—laying bare the possibility for symbiotic economics rooted in beauty and care and inevitably power and strength. My photographs animate this practice of coalition-building, exploring difference to forge connections; articulating intersectional questions rather than formulating and relying on generic truths. They reflect a circular future rooted in supply-chain consciousness that confronts global monocultures. By incorporating decarbonized raw materials through global textile waste management, they conjure a shift from hyper-industrialized disconnected civilization to an embodied civilization.

Objects as Storyteller: CoEvolving through Interspecies Intimacies
Paradise Theater As I precariously dance, I am wearing VHS tape-ribbon hand-knitted, moebius-looped dress (inspired by the artist’s loom-woven cassette-tape outfits). The VHS ribbons are made from mylar that is coated with toxic metals—allowing the tape to carry a magnetic signal, allowing the tape to tell stories. In front of projected images, I dance those woven stories—exposing their fertile contradictions. Through music and film, this biohazardous VHS-mylar material connects us and expresses some of our most intimate storytelling (multiple stories told through pop-culture movies, cross-cultural and nature documentaries, and self-help videos recorded on VHS tapes). The second costume is a fibershed multispecies, communally-created wool outfit composed of multiple animal fibers (yak, sheep, llama, goat). For this bioregional collaboration involving over thirty fibershed community members, typewritten (using a 1950s typewriter) locally, hand-made hemp-paper tags hung from each patch of woven fiber indicating the species and breed of animal, the farmer, spinner, weaver, or knitter (including sheep horns as buttons). Projected images include my cross-cultural climate justice book: Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and video stills from a documentary on The Love Bus, my family’s eco-art school bus tiny home. I conclude by amplifying contradictions: dancing in my woven-VHS-mylar costume with Yaks—integral to my community’s fibershed.

Dancing with James Baldwin, I Am Not An Externality.
Paradise Theater Enveloped by racial, social, ecological justice documentary films, I dance on a balance beam. Part of the call & response with my viewer is my most recent performance in which my head and various body parts are bound in bubble wrap (plastic used for shipping consumer products).  In this series, with projected film across my movements, I “dialogue” with James Baldwin’s “I Am Not Your Negro” film (2016 social critique directed by Raoul Peck, based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House and narrated by Samuel Jackson). Jackson’s narration of Baldwin’s story, the rustling of the suffocating, dancing plastic, and the precarious contact of my feet-on-edge form the co-mingling soundscape. There is no hierarchy within these multiple entwinements of cerebral wisdom and corporeal intelligence. I precariously thrash with plastic packing bubbles and suffocating synthetic textiles wrapping my body like a second skin, exploring the relationship among capitalism, white supremacy, petro-consumer culture, greenwashing, and historical industrialized racism. In this improvisational pedagogical performance series, I explore assimilation and environmental racism as the foundation of industrial consumer-waste culture. These improvisations ignited my publications, “Boycott Civilization” in The Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, “There Are No Externalities in an Ecological Civilization,” and “Co-Creating Cultural Evolution: Transforming Sacrifice Zones into Contact Zones.”

Where Are You From?
Body Worlds Exhibit, Seoul S. Korea In collaboration with the Korean installation, fabric artist, Han Jemma, I play with the racist, ethnocentric, xenophobia question: “Where Are You From?” My mother and I were clearly displaced, seen as foreigners—trespassing on U.S. territory: “Where are you from?” They would insist…incredulously…“No, where are you really from?” This was my first embodied understanding of the relationship between individual experience and the greater whole, the vulnerability of my “ethnic” body and the vulnerability of my “natural” environment, the private and the public, microcosmic interactions reflecting macrocosmic interconnections. I quickly learned both the extraordinary danger and vitality of difference–the lived intersection between cultural diversity and biodiversity. As I dance with my projected images of “incarcerated” bodies from the Body Worlds Exhibit in Seoul, wearing VHS tape-ribbon hand-knitted, moebius-looped dress (inspired by the artist’s loom-woven cassette-tape outfits), I shift the question “Where Are You From?” away from people who appear “different” to asking objects where they come from (and where they are going)–eliciting an investigation into their supply chain. This textile performance is at the core of my supply-chain consciousness manifesto.

Hair as Textile: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
Rural Pennsylvania We, too, are animals. Aside from our skin, hair is our first form of clothing. Like wool, the production (healthy bodies) and disposal (compost) of hair is biodegradable so it does not contribute to any pollution in our soils, oceans, or air (aside from the cosmetics industry and conventional hair products). How we choose to wear our hair is one of the clearest indicators (or lack of) of contemporary fashion. The 1967 musical (my favorite!) HAIR! represents how deeply political hair is—hair has always been. For almost 30 years I have explored hair as textile—protection, weaving, veils. Always as both a political and aesthetic exploration, I have shaved my past shoulder-length curls down, beyond the buzz, to my scalp. The first four times I did this, in my 20s, 30s, and 40s, shedding that luxurious, thick, heavy “female”-defining hair, that gendered, racialized garment growing out of my head; chopping off thick curly braids and shaving my head to my scalp offered exposure as “liberation”—vulnerability as strength (I wrote my doctoral dissertation on this manifestation of vulnerability). However, now in my almost-mid-50s, chopping off thick curly braids and shaving my head to my scalp has been an exercise in becoming too vulnerable, I feel too naked.

Collaboration with Han Jemma and her wearable zipper sculptures, Gosokgukdo
Seoul National Expressways 고속국도; Hanja: 高速國道 While living in Seoul, teaching Iyengar yoga and collaborating with Korean artists, I shot images with Han Jemma in her wearable zipper sculptures. Han Jemma’s fascinating forms that have no beginning and no end can continually grow and engulf life (like industrialized capitalism). They offer seductive contradictions of sealing in, sealing out, containing and releasing. (Zippers are remarkably complex and a garment item most of us take for granted. The structure of a zipper represents cooperation, unity, and cohesion. an JemmaIn contrast, the Amish tend to believe that zippers represent lack of humility—they are too flashy, complicated, disruptive.) One of our favorite sites was at the edge of a busy expressway. (Seoul’s urban expressways, arterial roads, and sub-arterial roads remind me of woven textiles. Car culture reflects the dangers of fast fashion/textile tyrannies). Later, I would project across my performing body the images I had shot of Han Jemma emerging from and burrowing into her organic/synthetic zipper objects. I would then photograph a delightful interplay of luminosity and shadow, warp and weft across my movement that functioned as a kind of garment. As a Sephardic, Arab-Jewish woman in front of and behind my camera lens, I ask: how do we simultaneously generate new long-term infrastructures rooted in our epigenetic potential of supply-chain embodied awareness that proliferates individual and collective sustainability while committing to radical change in the now?

Warp & Weft #77
Seoul, Ssamzie Space, Artfactories In my Warp and Weft series I collaborated with sustainable fashion designers to make found-object costumes/photo props projects that I would photograph myself dancing with and then project on various sculptural (often woven) surfaces and finally do a fourth layer of artmaking/ image production—photographing myself dancing in front/within of those projections. This process echoes the work I did with zipper-artist Han Jemma. The designs focused on simultaneously revealing and concealing. My eco-feminist ethics of difference and a politics of transformation is rooted in an investigation of how to privately and publicly dissolve the calcified and calcifying tyranny of certainty—that which obliterates the possibility of flux, of difference, both lived and shared. Within the context of my other bodies of work focused on shifting Anthropocentric paradigms, the Warp & Weft series explores the eco-social-political implications of commodifying the body of the other—19^th and 20^th chattel slavery as the foundation for American capitalism. This includes not only African, Mexican, Chinese, Jewish sweat shops, but of course women’s bodies as machines of reproduction. Warp & Weft #77 is a still from my 2023 video that focuseson how to negotiate contradictions within the textile industry and our urban-industrial landscape.

Original Images for Radical Symbiosis, Textile Tyrannies-Lost Valley in the Cube #32
Lost Valley Permaculture Ecovillage, Oregon These images are part of an original series I projected in Radical Symbiosis, Textile Tyrannies-Lost Valley in the Cube. Although not directly a self-portrait, I projected this photograph in my autoethnographic textile dance at Virginia Tech’s Institute, Creative Art & Technology (see above). Radical Symbiosis, Part I of this interdisciplinary collaboration began rehearsals in May 2025 and will be performed in December 2025. This creative/pedagogical/eco-political manifesto, a multimedia performance, explores supply-chain consciousness and radical social justice transformation. Using photography, sculpture, textile design, performance art, improvisational and choreographed dance, it incorporates the Trickster (contradictory perspectives) through infrastructures of storytelling–unveiling narratives of objects we normally take for granted). Embodying Intersectionality: The Practice of Collective Action, Part II will take place in February and April 2026. The project will involve multiple audiences through multi-media exchanges, including audience-participatory workshops focusing on radical self-accountability and collective risk taking and infrastructural redesign, performance-based book readings, and an exhibit of selected images from my cross-cultural climate justice book: Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era–Foreword by Vandana Shiva, Endorsements by Noam Chomsky, Paul Hawkin, Bill McKibben + many other activists.

Climate Chaos Lingerie #99
Nederland, Colorado; Magnolia abandoned coal mine Drawing from my experiences learning ethnobotany from the Quijos Quechua in Ecuador and learning in village-scale textile cooperatives in Thailand (near PunPun Organic Farms—a sister community to Paonia, Colorado), I “performed” this steamy winter scene: skin on snow chased by ghosts of the coal industry (deteriorating, rusted vehicles, equipment, mine shafts). Part of an Ecological Arts curriculum integrating plant-sources (pomegranate, indigo, madder) and low-tech approaches to dying, my performance plays with the web of form, use, color, texture, and landscape as a guide to developing Fibershed consciousness. Wrapping and freeing my body in both highly synthetic materials (ironically made to mimic nature) and peace silk/ahimsa silk (ahimsa=non-violence), made by women’s sewing cooperatives-using prickly pear cactus quills and dyed with cochineal insects, I explore the absurdity and complexity of our consumption-obsessed, waste-oblivious society leading to climate chaos. The binding for the natural dyes is a rusty nail—integral to my family’s folklore which is also central to this pedagogical performance that highlights our Movement of Fashion Activists, Farmers, Educators, and Multi-Fiber Makers.

Trickster at the Crossroads: Kentucky Blue Grass or Flax?
Pennsylvania & Colorado How can we practice and eventually embody the wisdom and practices of non-Industrial cultures and of cultures from centuries ago? This diptych plays with the contradictions implicit in this question: I am not romanticizing, thus de-politicizing economies-of-scale textile    or agricultural production. There was often extreme slave labor even in family, small-scale textile dye manufacturing—for example, “Ju Dou,” the exquisite 1990 film about early 20^th century China. However, we must examine what we think we know when it comes to overallocated river systems, poisoning our watersheds, and fiber production/consumption, dyeing, and disposal. The upper image (in the center I am offering my decarbonize dance) is part of my ongoing Butoh-based Mycelium Dance. Kentucky Blue Grass mimics a polyester textile worn by the suburban hillside. The foreground figures represent mycelium networks. The lower image is Flip-Side Farms, my farmer friend who has committed to Flax (linum usitatissium=most useful) production (her traditional flax tools viewed here). Whether we live in a rural, urban, or suburban environment, we are inundated with normalcies we are not even aware of. Fertilizer intensive lawns that accommodate HOA regs and golf courses are a prime example. Yaks grazing, dung beetles, biomimicry, drought, fertilizer overload are integral to our subject & collective action. What if we replaced lawns with fields of flax and reintroduced infrastructures to support them?

ARTIST STATEMENT:
As a color analog and digital photographer, video artist, author, activist, and mother, I experience my visual work as sociological investigation, eco-political manifesto, and collaboration with our everyday worlds. My images offer lived-surrealist practice (anarchic and aesthetic, domestic and democratic) as an ethical strategy to undermine taken-for-granted capitalist norms. The quotidian in relation to the sensual, guttural spectacle is heightened by the collision of bodies strewn both purposefully and haphazardly through interwoven architectures—both natural and human made. I arrange space, objects, and bodies (including my own) in such a way that blur the lines that separate them. This luminescent excess inhabits both the domestic and the animalistic. Within my photographic work, the grotesque or disarrayed body of the other/ the bisexual/ unfamiliar/ abject/ deviant/ immigrant/ socially inappropriate female is intended to dislocate pre-determined categories of identification central to fossil-fuel economies of alienation. My cinematic photographs evoke a dialogue between beauty and the grotesque. Using the body (often through self-portraiture), I explore cycles of nature and their continuous transformation that potentially undermines self-destructive social and spiritual inertia embedded in advanced capitalist norms. Contradictory landscapes embody the apocalypse—revealing the brutality of habituated obedience to the norm. Invoking tension among coercion, assimilation, and ritual, my eco-surrealist images unmask industrial society’s self-destructive fossil-fuel addictions while potentially transforming convenience-culture consciousness. I intend for my images and accompanying text to remind the viewer of shifting positions that require continual negotiation among anthropocentric expectations and the inevitability of our interdependency. My images move beyond the isolated “I” into the collective “we.”