alyssa denay carter (she/they) is an interdisciplinary weaver and birth worker. Her care work and creative practice are interrelated in their interrogation of life cycles and uphold modes of self-preservation and interdependency. alyssa’s work examines embodiment and performance of intersecting identities using weaving, fiber arts & integrated printmaking techniques. She weaves skins to be worn (and often shed), exploring the concept of bodies rooted in spaces and places rooted in bodies—inherited cultural memory—joy, resilience, means of self-preservation, outgrowing your old self to make space for the new, ancestral strength and knowledge. She’s in conversation with her own, and others’, identity and the natural and human-made world around her.
For more information, please see: https://www.alyssadenaycarter.com/ and on Instagram @southernbaptistmulattaslut.
alyssa denay carter, next life, Dreaming, 2020. Still image from installation at Flux Factory. Image courtesy of the artist.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
I think this question is in large part why it has taken me so long to participate in this project. It is hard to answer! How am I? How am I. I am up and down and all over the place. One extreme to the next.
I am pretty raw. Overall I’m loving deeply, feeling deeply, grieving deeply, and continually adapting and readjusting. Lots of growing pains.
I go from feeling very intensely to totally shutting down. I’m trying to learn how to stay open and present to mourning and bliss and all that is in between...and I am learning the thin line between joy and grief and how to tend to that. I am also trying to learn to be gentle on myself through this process and that temporarily sinking into bingeing shows is OK. : )
I have a wild hope for the future and I am getting by with the help of my love, friends that are family and my family, by attempting honest and open communication, and trying to find routine and stability in my day-to-day.
It's my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
Honestly, I hadn’t had much of a consistent art practice since college, until the pandemic hit. In school I was fortunate to have my tuition and living expenses subsidized by aid, scholarship, and loans, so I didn’t have to sell my time to make ends meet. It was my job to work in my studio and that was awesome and totally unlike the years that have followed.
Post-graduation, I lived and worked in Brooklyn. Most of my energy was very much taken up by working or looking for work. So, I really didn’t engage with myself and the work I wanted to create. The pandemic has been my first introduction to getting to develop a studio practice outside of academia, at my own pace. Once my pandemic assistance hit in May it was awesome. That was the first time I made a living wage. I was able to sink into myself and figure out how I like to spend my time and exist without the pressure of getting by.
I am a bit introverted and require a lot of alone time to recharge, and there have been times in the pandemic when I have been totally alone, and times when I have been immersed in intense community and never felt alone. I am sure these inner rhythms have been helpful, and at the same time I am curious how my personality and patterns may be permanently shifting.
alyssa denay carter, Untitled Work in Progress, 2020. Woven nylon, digital image. Image courtesy of the artist.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I generally begin by weaving a sculptural skin with nylon monofilament, though sometimes I use other materials. The nylon is tiny and a total pain in the ass to work with but I really like the process--nothing ever turns out as planned so it has taught me to be more flexible and work with the materials I use, in general, rather than against them.
Once woven, the nylon is a lot sturdier than it looks--so friends and myself can dump the skins into the water letting them ebb and flow or dance in the woods with them. Sometimes I even use heat to manipulate the nylon, or run them through print presses for copper etching when I have access to printmaking studios. So yeah, I love the process of weaving with nylon and also after the piece is woven, continuing to push it and work with it to make more work and experiment.
I call my weavings “skin/s.” I am obsessed with the idea of shedding and skin and moving through space. How does our environment impede or aid our ability to be ourselves? Snakes shed in patches when faced with dry conditions--is a patchy snake shed due to dry conditions a lesser production? Or is it a testament to their ability to survive despite impossible conditions? How can we adapt and change in order to move through spaces accepted or undetected? What is lost or put aside when we mold to fit? Who’s allowed in what spaces? These are some ideas that fuel a lot of my work and thoughts.
I use the woven skin/s that survive these multiple processes of experimentation in performance and documentation to investigate process of becoming, unbecoming, rebecoming; using the transmutation of materials as direct metaphor for self-preservation, resilience, shapeshifting, as well as the lyrical and mechanical gestures of the loom to speak to the awkward and uncomfortable corporeal movement itself required to change/grow/remain.
It is really important to me to work collaboratively and in community. I am nothing without the people that I love and who love me, and it is so incredibly amazing to get to walk through this lifetime with so many stimulating and loving and inspiring people. Many loves of mine offer their bodies, thoughts and hearts to my projects and for that I am GRATEFUL. I constantly seek their validation as well, I am sure it can be a bit much. I’m needy.
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection to what's currently happening? And why, or why not?
Not directly. In the past year I was first displaced due to circumstances surrounding the pandemic, then temporarily uprooted again after being evacuated because of the wildfires. Many of the past months were in motion and I was longing to make home.
My day-to-day creative energy has gone largely into creating home, and dreaming about my and our collective next life. I think the work right now isn’t necessarily about producing more physical work but is more about reflecting on capitalist modes of production, and how value is prescribed within this system and how can we go against this. It’s about leaning into the alone/lonely, and giving space to what comes up when we sit with ourselves. It’s about establishing and holding fast to our networks of care. It’s about undoing and unlearning.
These themes of home and shifting place show up in the work I make.
alyssa denay carter, me and jeanne, dancer in next life, Dreaming, 2020. Still image from video. Image courtesy of the artist.
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
I was dming with a buddy Eliza in late 2020, and she said something like “Last year feels nonexistent”.. I really feel that.
I am sure that there are ways I am thinking differently, coping differently, and inspired differently…but I am not sure if I can identify them yet. I still feel so in this moment--it’s hard to remember a “before” in a linear way…only 10 months ago…let alone process it all and actively reflect.
Pre-pandemic, I was dating the idea of individualism being fake. The systems we ascribe to are only real because we believe in them, not because they are true. Throughout the pandemic I've seen radical community care and mutual aid really show up. People were really out here redistributing their government aid better than the government ever would. It’s highlighted the ways all oppression--from black and indigenous communities, to prisons and all carceral systems, from climate injustice and the war on Tigray to people who are differently abled --are all interwoven and connected as functions and exploitations of capitalism. It’s all made any previously lingering notion of individualism in my mind totally moot.
I have really been thinking a lot about Patricia Hill Collins and the matrix of domination and how no one is free until the Blackest, poorest Trans person is free.
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment?
I am finding solace and joy in having a home with an oven, and having love and being so close to the ocean.
alyssa denay carter, On The Way, 2020. Woven nylon, digital image. Image courtesy of the artist.
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling?
I wouldn’t say I am researching anything...maybe my own body?
I have an intimate relationship with holding trauma in my body. A lot of 2018, and 2019, was about learning the ways in which this trauma is nuanced and shows up and affects how I love and think and exist in relation to myself and in intimate platonic and romantic relationships.
I had been living in a very disembodied way. I was often dissociated or detached from the physicality of experience, of existing in my own skin. I had and have a deep longing to meet myself again and I had intention for 2020 to be the year I began reconnecting to my body through movement and dance.
I have only just begun using my own body in my work. I have had a lot of fear and hesitation when approaching this before. These skins are intimately connected with myself and processing my experiences and I have feared what might come up if I literally embody them.
I am slowly (and I mean slooooowly) working my way through a book by Andrea Olsen--Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. This has been helpful in mapping my own body through place and looking into my relationship to the places I have been and the places’ relationship to me; what is my impact to place and what is the places’ impact on me? This has been intense.
Are you reading anything?
I am reading and rereading pieces of ~~ Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines; The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise; Working the Roots: Over 400 years of Traditional African-American Healing; Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being; Corpus; old journals and letters.
alyssa denay carter, The Three Fates, 2018. Woven cotton, paper. Models - Meron Afutu, Brittany J. Camacho, Salem Tewelde. Photo: Mae Eskenazi.