I’ve been working on a drawn words series for a while but not getting very far. When I started drawing Kin, I didn’t start with a plan but it felt like it drew itself, the scales and claws popping up before I realized it. Moving through each letter, the natural world asserted its place as family of humankind, not “resources” to be killed and exploited. Then, while carving the image to create the relief print, I ruminated about the origins of this idea as a tree cast it's shadow across the linoleum. Since I didn’t make this up, what wild seeds did it spring from? It came from Stevie Wonder, The Secret Life of Plants, and a bead museum proprietor in Detroit named Dabl, who told me about trees who are revered as ancestors. It most likely came from Braiding Sweetgrass, in which Robin Wall Kimmerer proposed alternative pronouns for our non-human relatives based on the Anishinaabe language: the singular “ki” and the plural “kin”. Replacing “it”, this renaming turns objects into subjects, and in stories, subjects are characters with their own perspective, feelings and agency.
Perhaps you see your deep connections to animals and plants and fungi, your relationship to living things not simply as a defender, caregiving as you would for a loved one, but as a student, advocate, and collaborator. But it’s not enough for a few people to live this way; the idea needs to grow wings, spread like mycelium networks, and branch out to people who have never thought of sentience that way. Those humans are missing part of their family tree, and this missed connection is wreaking havoc on them and they on the Earth. Let’s pollinate collective discourse with the beautiful thought of the Kin all around us.
This relief print was printed on a Vandercook letterpress on handmade paper. Some variations exist in the paper texture and inking.
