a bibliography started in september 2019, but the ideas below have been building as a kind of humidity for a long time now.

for reference, i’ve lived with arthrogryposis, a visible, congenital birth defect, since birth, but I think of the audience for these thoughts as wide and self-selecting.

the passages in the textual component of a bibliography each correspond to a ceramic vessel––physical footnotes for each passage (and vice versa), growing in number, and as variations-of-a-form, going forward.

this exhibition features the first seven entries in the project that can be read at the bottom of this gallery–dozens are forthcoming for future installations.

1 + n
…the human anthropomorphizes the cup and the cup cupomorphizes the human (Timothy Morton, ​Hyperobjects​)…i, like many others, have been cupomorphized by everyday objects my whole life and in constant searching of release. to be fair, this is not always a burden, encounters with everyday objects become relationships that grow in strange and unpredictable ways, and i develop love affairs with new object approaches that creep into everyday routines. I’m humbled by generous objects, they are also lovers.

b.
at 43 years old, i was asked, and shared, my sexual fantasies for the first time with a lover. i had never asked or been asked, i was always just happy and grateful to be there. there is a profound generosity in this act of asking, and especially to a body of difference…i think about this all the time now of every ‘body’–have they been asked?

tab
“​TAB​ (Temporarily Able-Bodied) refers to the inevitable—namely, that most of us will face disability at some point in our lives; whether it comes sooner or later varies depending upon one’s circumstances.” TAB has been a mainstay of disability community language…for (over ) 30 years.” this term, while contentious, to me feels productive. as ​Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin​ say, “it is a way for a disability activist (or anyone discussing disability) to quickly and effectively bring all…listeners into one group: some of us are disabled now and many of us will be sooner or later. It’s a phrase that builds community, that reminds people that the needs of some are really the needs of everyone.” i like to think of infants in this category too to further the point–we all start as wildly unable–and many of us will end up there too.

9/20/19
if an orgasm turns disability into a momentary satellite of the body, what of the space between?

greta
AMY GOODMAN: So, before you went global — we met you in Poland — before we came, seeing your hashtag, seeing your Twitter feed, it said — at the time, you were 15 — “15-year-old climate activist with Asperger’s.” That’s a part we didn’t talk about yet, the Asperger’s. When were you diagnosed? And how do you think that contributes to your concern and your singular focus on this issue?
GRETA THUNBERG​: When I’m really interested in something, I get superfocused on that. And I can spend hours upon hours not getting tired of reading about it and still be interested to learn more about it. And that is very common for people on the autism spectrum. And yeah, and it just — I think that was one of the reasons why, why I was one of the few who really reacted to the climate crisis, because I couldn’t connect the dots why people were just going on like before and still saying, “Yes, climate change is very important.” I don’t get that double moral, in a way, the difference from between what — between what you know and what you say and what you do, how you act. And for me, it’s called cognitive dissonance. And I don’t really — I, in a way, I walk the walk. If I decide to do something, then I do it. And so, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You have called being on the spectrum your superpower. Why?
GRETA THUNBERG: Because it helps me see things in a way that others might not see, and it just helps me be different, which I think is a superpower in a society where everyone is the same, where everyone thinks the same, everyone looks the same, everyone does the same things. And so I think that is something to really be proud of, that you are different. And in such a crisis like this, we need to think outside the box. We need outside-the-box thinking. We cannot continue thinking like we are today, within our current system. And we need to — and then we need people who think outside the box and who can see this from a different perspective. And, of course, it’s not always only a gift and a superpower, that many people suffer from — suffer from it, because they cannot get the right adjustments they need, and they are not living under the right circumstances, which I didn’t, as well, for a long time. But now I do.

bluets
“19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.”
–Bluets by Maggie Nelson

10/3/19
i cannot yet lovingly handle the ceramic vessels i’m making for this project. I’ve broken a number of works, and i have impatience and shame each time i disappoint them.