Hi friends, it’s been a while. I won’t bury the lede.
I have moved into my new home! It is a 1200-square-foot new construction work/live space in mid-town Santa Fe — it is mostly devoid of character other than the lines are clean and industrial, the ceilings high, and there is a sightline to sunrise (and moonrise!) over the Sangre de Cristos. At a practical level, I bought the place because it is rentable both as residential and commercial space, it’s located in an “up and coming” area of the city, it was the right price, yadda yadda.
But the real reason I landed in this space is I wanted a blank canvas.
There are no ghosts here besides what I have carried in my boxes. Even those are curated. The Afghan rug I took my first steps on; the painting I bought in a coffee shop in the Mission; a 30-year anthology of seashells and rocks I have collected; piles of yoga, astrology, and poetry books. My stacks of journals go back to age 16:
March 21, 1991
…I have this feeling like if I write it down then it will be judged but if it’s in my mind, it is my thought alone. But writing it down and sharing it with paper. As Mrs. Drinker, my geometry teacher says, commit yourself to paper.
Indeed! Who knew that 30 years later I’d still be working on committing myself to paper and operating with a sophomore-year Geometry class lesson? The wide-open page, the blank canvas, the empty space… commit!
Last week, as I was moving into my new space and meeting the neighbors, they kept asking “Are you an artist?” My next-door neighbor actually IS an artist (you know, one with grants, awards, gallery shows, cool hats, and a small poodle. She’s lovely and talented.)
At first, I demurred. No, not an artist. No, definitely not a painter. But their disappointed faces and reactions told me that wasn’t the right answer. The neighborhood WANTS an artist.
So I’ll try to deliver.
As A. explained to me, everyone is an artist in Santa Fe, and when pressed on my medium, I can say simply “multi-media.” So there ya go! It’s true. I’ll even commit to my first artist statement:
“Cat New is a writer and multi-media artist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Their work explores the intersection of home, climate change, and systems of meaning and is rooted in the un-rooted. Like many growing up with divorced parents in the 70s and 80s, Cat lived in more than a dozen places by the time they were a teenager, moving frequently between coasts and households. That sense of dislocation ultimately has been a driving force in their work as an essayist, creating resilience for the inner and outer geography of self. Now, as the forces of climate change continue to uproot people from the places they call home, this sense of dislocation is a feature of eco-anxiety and climate-related trauma. Drawing from diverse sources — from psychology and spirituality to economics to climate science to urban policy — Cat’s writing and other works seek to explore how to understand, contextualize, and build a new understanding of the concept of home in the 21st century. Her goal is to contribute to building individual and social resilience as positive climate action.”
As I write this, I want to surface again that 33 million people in Pakistan — for context that is New York City FOUR times over — were dislocated from floods this month.
So let’s talk about that artist’s statement.
While the name of this publication will remain the same, consider that artist’s statement to be your fair warning! Things will get opinionated, political, artsy, climate science-y, unsophisticated, and maybe even healing as we move forward.
I am at the halfway mark of my climate studies fellowship with Terra.do and the assignment this week was to submit an idea/project for a “climate track” we want to follow.
This artist statement is part of that assignment, and WAY bigger than I even know what to do with. But I am willing. I am willing to bite off a piece and try. To be honest I am totally daunted.
My imposter syndrome as an artistic creator is strong; my conditioning told me that I needed to either create a start-up (Feather, a de-growth green e-commerce platform to help people locate and find the greenest products for their new homes) or go into policy because I need to be working on systemic change at the highest levels. And while both ideas do interest me intellectually, I guess, I also intuitively felt like I needed to tack in a different direction.
So art and words it is. <3
Canvas
Congratulations on the new home! I can't wait to visit. Also: I love the artist statement (and, uh, can you write mine for me?). Artists are essential to the collective. I appreciated this Slow Factory series about this topic. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd5n0guu8cI/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=