On the exploitation of body, land, and practice
We must hold accountability in the framework of our systems
The spider’s web is web of protection around art-making, around play, and around intentional community. It is an offering of spaciousness from social media. This work allows me to take time with my daily practice, with myself, and with my communities that feels easeful in my body. I hope that these offerings will bring you more ease and consideration in your own body. You can find me here, my contact, and my IG @meredithannewhite.
I’m going to go ahead and give a content warning for this writing. There is discussion of assault and colonization of body, land, and practice in this particular offering. I’d like to highlight that I will only speak from my own experience. I’d also like to note that I am an incredibly imperfect human-being writing on topics that are nuanced and deserve to be treated as such. I speak from a white, queer, and neurodivergent body. I ask that you continue to use discernment in your own practices always. Thank you for being here.
I move between worlds and containers often. I pull reckonings to the surface to be questioned and shared with a larger whole. I touch many different things collecting data in my day-to-day. This data becomes the shapes in my quilts and drawings. This research transmutes into imaginative conversation. This observation directly translates into interpersonal relationship.
My practice moves through each layer of my being. My offerings come from the sacred relationship I have with everything around me at any given moment. The work I bring into community has become this writing that you are able to access as a free offering if you so choose.
I’ve invested so much time into decolonizing my practice. I create space each day to hold very honest discourse with myself and those around me. As I hold myself more accountable in these spaces, I offer how hard it has been for me to protect myself at the intersection of creativity, business, and practice.
I’ve had a project resurface after many years. This project took place at the very beginning of my creative journey. It took over a year of my labor. I had a hand in the branding of the dining space. The design team reached out to me as the restaurant is currently moving to another location and undergoing a rebrand. The team wanted the pieces free of charge so that they may manipulate the work to fit the liking of the space without my hand in the process. I told them no after much confusion on my end.
The team created work in the likeness of my own after this dialogue. The members of the team are directly woven into my creative community. I took this opportunity to hold myself more accountable in self-advocacy. I took this opportunity to create very honest dialogue with one of the artists who was willing to have the conversation with me. I took the opportunity to vocalize new boundaries and create much better contracts.
The lack of respect and compensation for my work cannot be undone. I am uninterested in working with this restaurant group again. I am, however, interested in how we as artists hold ourselves accountable in the spaces that we occupy out of a place of privilege. I am interested in how we might diminish our fragility around fucking up. I am interested in someone coming to me and saying, “I apologize. I took something from you. How might we repair this?” without me prompting it.
This particular instance has allowed me to see where I dimmed my light around my work for many years because so much was stolen from me. I’ve shared deeply personal writings only to see the exact words used for a close friend’s spiritual teachings on social media. I created a textile collection that then became someone’s entire brand. I was asked to create a Pride campaign for free by one of the nation’s largest email marketing agencies. I’m tired. I’m angry. I’m tired of being told that I can’t be angry.
We are told that creativity can be packaged as product. We are told that femme, queer, and marginalized bodies are those to be exploited and colonized. We take without any consideration of how much or how often. Instead of crediting the artist or movement or conversation, we take for our own.
It allows me to see that in order to continue to create offerings that are soft, I must continue to strengthen my boundaries. I must continue to dig into holding myself accountable in these practices so that I may better bring them into community.
We cannot exist within community without accountability.
How do we hold ourselves accountable in crediting work at its source?
How do we protect our creative practice in digital containers?
How can we use our positions of privilege in the spaces we already occupy?
How might we build reciprocity into the framework of our contracts?
Am I exploiting someone’s experience by creating this work?
If a client is wanting work unlike my own, can I direct them to an artist who would be a better fit?
These reckonings come directly from the people in my life who have these conversations with me. These reckonings come from the podcasts I listen to, the books I am reading, and those who have the courage to have these conversations outwardly with their communities. Much of these reckonings come directly from the marginalized communities who have built these questions into their frameworks long before the colonization of their work and space.
🤎 I hung a quilt in the forest with Danielle Brutto for the week of action. This is what I wrote with the piece:
“As an offering of soft resistance, I strung a quilt up amongst the trees with yarn. Forest defenders thread yarn through the trees as a way to trip up authorities in their efforts to destroy the forest. This is a transition quilt: from this life to the next; for those who have been forgotten — in this city, in these woods, and in our spaces of day-to-day. You are woven into our movements, our conversations, and our awareness. Thank you for holding us in our transitions.
I invite you to touch, to sit with, and to remember those who have moved in these spaces long before us. I invite you to bring awareness to those who cannot be in these movements due to lack of accessibility. I invite you to give thanks to the land that holds us in these spaces.”
🤎 Sugar Baby hopped into my life a few weeks ago. We are learning about each other right now. It is challenging and wonderful.
🤎 Follow @tarabeekeepers on IG for more bee content and if curious about learning more about bees! They host monthly workshops here in Atlanta, and I’ll be sharing more of my experience and the photos I’ve collected over this last year and a half with beekeeping.
With rage as I allow anger to come to the forefront of my practice,
You can find me here, my contact, and my IG @meredithannewhite.
Thank you to everyone who has read, liked, shared with others, and subscribed. I’m grateful
this writing is a generous act. giving voice to the in-between moments where power can disappear, unless claimed, is courageous. thank you for sharing, and in particular inspiring me to be more accountable to myself. as a recovering people pleaser, those boundaries and conversations are always the most difficult.