Faith Wilding

My personal and collective work focuses on physical/psychic states of the contemporary body violently cobbled together from natural, cultural, and technological fragments; recombinants with monstrous possibilities. My art uses beauty as a transformational tactic. My first 19 years I lived in Paraguay. As a child, I was intimate with its complex ecology, dense tropical forests, vast campos, lush swamps, multifarious species of plants, birds, animals, and insects. I touched them, drew them, marveling at their myriad forms. Paraguay’s mother tongue, Guaraní, has one of the world’s richest botanical vocabularies. Its indigenous population, knowledge, and ecologies have been decimated by colonization, wars, and big agriculture. I want to record what is left, and what has been lost, in a project “A Comparative Herbarium,” part illuminated manuscripts, drawings, and writings, part installation, video, sound art, and performance. My research will go deep: listening, drawing, writing, making sculptures from found materials. This work is reparative and feminist: it mourns and commemorates, while meditating on the possibilities of collective regeneration.