
Need a clever header here
In 2020, I had to terminate a non-viable pregnancy using a prescription of Misoprostol. Prior to the miscarriage, I had started a habit wheel to help me remember daily tasks for keeping the growing fetus healthy. Once the fetus was gone, I didn’t want to give up the new-found practice of attending to my habits - good and bad. I turned the practice into a creative one, relishing in the visualized data that represented me each month, a code only I could crack. The process helped me through the grief of the lost pregnancy and has become a creative practice that improves my mental health. I now have over 48 charts that are a visual map of the months through which I endured a global pandemic, coming to terms with infertility, the loss of bodily autonomy as a woman. I keep the prescription bottle that held four pills as a reminder of what I lost and I keep the charts as a reminder of what I have gained. For 14 years, my artistic practice has been as one embedded in the community, weaving partnerships and people together through textile craft. I am in Alabama and Alabama is in me. Color Coda is a burgeoning body of work that explores what it means to live as womxn in this state, holding one’s own mental and emotional wellbeing in our hands, bolstered by the collective community. It will begin as a resource in the form of a workbook where I will also share my own story and document conversations amongst my peers in places of intersectionality. The weight of existing within the well-buttressed political scaffolding of Alabama state government falls heaviest on womxn within BIPOC and LGBTQ communities. I want to learn about other ways womxn in Alabama are subverting and maintaining through coded artistic practice.