Fire Warrior, 2024

Fire Warrior, 2024

Czech and Japanese seed beads, cotton thread, nylon thread, beeswax, reclaimed bandages, copper, horsehair, mitigo asemaa, cedar, fire

A submission to tinypricksproject, a collective call for activist art that doesn’t often intersect with my community.

The piece itself reverberates the last words of Aaron Bushnell, and echoes his phoenix energy in its flame charred edges. A blend of cotton, polyester, and synthetic rubber, the bandages comprise a material that would produce considerable smoke and ash and melt into skin if ignited against it.

It is both about the powerful spirit revealed through Aaron’s actions, and the acrid toxicity of white woman tears that counter such massive sacrifice with sickeningly little effort. If this warrior, of the most privileged demographic in the world, can renounce his rigid post, number his days to less than one and offer it to this cause, I would assert that art that claims its clout by means of an activist label can manage a few pulled threads and keystrokes in the name of disruption and true reflection of our times.

The copper, horsehair, mitigo asemaa, and cedar affixed to the surface were removed, and the latter three burned in reciprocity before sending the piece away.

The initial posting of this piece on Friday, 3.1.24 serves as the time stamp of the opportunity served up by Indigenous hands to amplify our voices in the way that these stitched words do. I didn’t tag the account because her response to receiving the physical piece is part of its concept. It’s been documented profusely in anticipation of any fate it may meet when it lands: whether it is discarded, destroyed, amplified, returned, or buried in the dark cabinet of an archive is an intentional reflection on the recipient. The piece was estimated to arrive on their end today.

Fire Warrior is intended to land grotesquely with the collective. Charred edges will fold in and hide the words, inviting the recipient to view them after peeling back the tacky layers of bandages adhering to themselves. The elasticity of the synthetic rubber serves as an eerie reminder of flesh. Adding stitches certainly felt like puncturing skin.

The char in the piece is intended to target a knee jerk correlation to charred skin, followed by a sustained association with burning documents. Similarly, glowing charcoal-lined orange beads are mixed in with black to summon both the burning away of bureaucratic conversation and the literal introduction of flame that grows with every word.

His initials were beaded in galvanized copper for its longevity, beauty, and medicine.

NOTE: The heaviest and most grueling part of this process on my spirit was not the handling of bandages, burning of my work, the slow honoring of last words or even the punctured skin of my fingertips by both the sharp and blunt ends of my needle, but the summoning and mouthing of the social media hashtags that served both to counteract the suppression of anti-genocidal art and to disrupt the comfortable ignorance that users of tags like #girlbosshustle and #goodvibesonly expect from everyday life. In every single one of these tags, the whiteness is implied and deviation from it is unwelcome. It took effort to stay centered in the gravity of the piece while handling such flippant words, but subversion of them felt relevant and necessary given the context. Already his actions are being dismissed by his demographic, so this is how I catch that ball with Indigenous hands and throw it back into the white court where it was intended to land.