Ashley Addair
PHOTO BY JEANNIE HUA
This is a statement about invisible labor. About who I am beyond mothering. It is a statement about being an artist whose contribution to cultural production resists objectification, resists commodification. It is also a statement about building a website, pulled from my website, because I don’t have much capacity to create outside the demands of provision. I am right now taking care of three children, between the times of village and the time of nuclear family. This is a statement forged through the cannibalistic nature of capitalism and the poetics of love:
Recently a curator asked me for my inventory and I told them I have nothing.
Nothing to show and I work all day, everyday. The inquiry made me realize that I've been too narrow in defining work. I've internalized this society's value system, thinking that my work needed to look like the work I am told is work instead of expanding the goddamn category for work.
I say goddamn because god is another category that needs expansion.
My website is a container, my website is not representative of my work, it is the work. And so is this word, and this one, and this one. I don’t have time for portfolios, for presenting and translating acts of care and anarchic interventions as art. I choose to give my lifeblood to wholehearted living, to quotidian revolution. I choose to gather my energy back from the labor of arguing that my labor is labor.
Morning planning and intention setting for myself and the family while tending to the needs of waking children
Knoxville, TN
