Grey Johnson
Sweet home
by Grey Johnson
When we braid, we spin treasures. Whispered things for private eyes. The braid is a code, an attempt to run away; it is infinitely intelligible, speaking beyond speech through the discourse of tradition, evolution, and conversation. Through the braid, a Black confidence is realized. Estrand a past syllable in a present phrase.
The braid becomes physical, semiotic resistance, a visual transference of meaning conveying consciousness beyond the spoken. Here, Black is a voiceless strategy. Meaning escapes the word’s perceptibility, its vulnerability to theft and identification. The visual exists beyond these trappings; its expression is immediate, its presence whole and hollow, a life that happens only in its mutuality. To present meaning in the semio-sensual is an attempt to shift the location of mutuality, to manipulate the elements of the “real” and immerse another into your experience. If we converse in the sensory, our translation endeavors to be total, so the gesture of the braid pursues instant and comprehensive speech whose meaning, reified and evolving in community and culture, lies beyond the white imaginary, communicating a full and intangible Black mutuality.
I summon presence out of the tree, symbolic and ancestral, whose leaves and lifeblood are lineage. The tree communicates a cross-temporal experience: animations of the future, traces of past.
I’m meditating on distance and struggling to breach the boundaries of time. What we miss and what is missing. I feel our rhythms and the fragments of her voice; between the limbs, warmth takes up space.
“I feel our rhythms and the fragments of her voice; between the limbs, warmth takes up space.”
Artist statement
Basing this project in the construction of a “family” tree, I wove together a meditative cultural practice, family history, and a discovery (or reconnection) of myself. Working through the practice of braiding, as a Black technique and meta-language, I superimpose wires over an elder tree to represent the difficulties of connecting through artificiality (the lack of connection in isolation), time as distance and proximity, and the healing capabilities of passing down knowledge. Through gendered communication, inheritance of happiness and pain, and the compelling power of love, I am building a “Sweet home,” a space to feel fully and rawly the presence of ancestors, present and past.