Our Members, Fiscally Sponsored Artists, and other program participants represent a wide range of career stages and disciplines. We love them - and, as fellow artists, we're always inspired by them. With this monthly feature, we hope you'll feel the same way!
Name: Autumn Kioti
Interdisciplinary Performance Artist + Fielday 2018 Performer
What inspires you?
My artistic practice is a quest for community. Plugging into my surroundings, to others, across disciplines, across gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and species. I seek to repurpose mundane items, or use items sustainably harvested from nature to foster a more immediate connection to the earth and tap into the universal spark that binds us all.
I scavenge bits of everything – from history and lore, science and mathematics, to David Attenborough animal documentaries – in the creation of writing, performance, works on homemade paper and Mylar, and installation. I use everything I can get my hands on in an effort to address societal and environmental issues in general, and trafficking in identity and connectivity in particular.
Playing with the notion of craft, conventionally considered "women's work," my work often incorporates weaving, knitting, embroidery, and food preparation, taking it in unexpected directions. In choosing to create moments that are site specific, re-purposing mundane scavenged objects, using urgent movement, mask, and costume; I seek to create a dialogue about our place, about what immobilizes us, tangles us up, throws us forward, and breaks us down. I like the surprises and the accidents, the failures and successes, the story, the connection.
Workshop photos from artist’s Santa Fe Art Institute themed residency, FOOD JUSTICE.
What are you proud of?
Still being alive today to create work despite battling mental illness, and being able to hopefully offer myself and my work a conduit for others to release their pain and trauma, and maybe together we can lead each other out of isolation.
What are your goals?
My goal is to journey, to seek, to experience, to tell stories, to collect stories, to create a web of connection and release for myself and others through my work wherever I go.
Any advice for fellow artists?
You're not doing it wrong if nobody knows what you're doing.
How does The Field help you?
I was brought here by my incredible experience with the 2018 revival of Fielday. I've never been involved with a more supportive collection of artists.
Performance/work photos by Anthony Collins, Autumn Kioti, Stephen Schnetzer.
©Autumn Kioti 2019
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