Carrie Redway on "Art and Death"

Autumn is traditionally a season for harvest, and then a season to witness the cycle of death. Our own Halloween in the United States (also known as All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints Day), began as Lemuria , an ancient Roman feast day to banish malevolent spirits. The Incan month which corresponds with our November, Ayamarca, roughly translates to “festival of the dead”. Samhain, is a festival at the end of harvest season, believed to be largely Celtic in origin, in which ancient burial mounds were opened as portals to the world of Death, and most of us have heard of Dia de Los Muertos, a Mexican celebration of one’s ancestors who have died (mostly due to the cultural appropriation of my fellow white women who think painting their faces like a sugar skull is “cute”)—the aforementioned list names just a few of the multitude of ways that humans have celebrated and observed the “dying” of the year and its relation to our own mortality.

In art, death has always been a popular subject, from the abundance of Memento Mori, Danse Macabre, and Death and the Maiden motifs, as well as hundreds of scenes of battle and war, such as Guernica (1937 oil painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso), to famous historical deaths like The Death of Marat (1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David). This segment of Critical Bounds features conversations with artists, writers, and curators, whose work delves into death, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For the first episode of our “Art and Death” segment, we welcome Carrie Redway. “Carrie Redway is a writer, mixed media artist and death doula in Seattle, WA. Her work is inspired by myth, folklore, ritual. Carrie aspires to create community spaces and tools for death education and exploration through writing and art. She facilitates epoch: a writing circle exploring death in nature and cycles. She is the author of the chapbook "Vulpecula", a conversation in poetry with the constellation Vulpecula about death and grief in various forms. She is currently working on a zine series on death topics. Her work has been published in various online and print journals such as Moonchild Magazine, Occulum, Rust + Moth, Spilled Milk, and Really System, among others.”

We discuss Carrie’s chapbook "Vulpecula" (which she reads from), find out just What IS a Death Doula?, and Carrie's path to becoming one. We talk about her connection with her grandmother through her childhood zines about death, Tips for people caring for dying loved ones in person and via distance, A Sacred Passing organization and training communities to do the work that our ancestors used to do, the invisibility of death in our (predominantly Western) culture, and movement as a tool for both grieving and creative processes.

All the Updates

It has been a busy past month, with moving, settling in, and recording.

During the past few weeks we have been fortunate to speak with several illuminating guests: Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman spoke with us about his upcoming feature film Early Stage, “…an anthology film, speculating about the inner life of artificially intelligent networks.”

For our segment on Art and Death, we conversed with Bethany Tabor, a cultural arts programmer whose work focuses on death and end of life practices, J Simmz, a curator, writer, and co-founder of Doppelgänger Projects in New York, who works closely with the Death Positive Movement. Simmz conceptualizes exhibitions with heavy focus on the cycles of life and death, mysticism, and transcendence. This segment also included poet, mixed media artist, founder of Thedna Arts, and death doula Carrie Redway. Redway’s work with death is closely related to cycles of nature, folklore, mythology, and ritual.

We also delved more deeply into our Art and Health segment, speaking with artist and physician Dr. Eric Avery. Avery’s work has spanned several decades, and includes work exploring the social side of the AIDS/HIV crisis, as well as emerging infectious diseases, human rights abuses, death, and sexuality. We were also excited to speak with Dr. Bettina Judd, a writer, artist, performer, current Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, and author of Patient, a book of poems that explores the historical utilization of, and standardization of the dehumanization of Black, non-cisgender male bodies in the field of Eurocentric healthcare that continues today.

Our new intern, Tori Currier.

We would also like to take this time to welcome our summer intern Tori Currier! Tori is originally from East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She currently resides in Northampton, Massachusetts where she attends Smith College. Tori is a junior (2022J) majoring in Art History. Focused on LGBTQ+ art, she is passionate about the role of art in social movements. Presently, she is conducting research for an honors thesis about AIDS crisis art and its continued censorship in the art world today. 

Tori intends to pursue a career in higher education. Her ambitions include changing how art history is traditionally taught by giving more attention to artists who have long been excluded or underappreciated. Interested in how history can be conveyed through creative fiction, Tori is developing a television screenplay about LGBTQ+ artists from the 60’s - 80’s, hoping to educate younger generations about the community’s history and the significant social roles that art has played throughout these decades. 

As an intern for Critical Bounds, she will strive to facilitate conversations about the importance of art in critical global issues. She is enthusiastic about how programs and websites in the social media age can become spaces for marginalized voices as well as tools to make education more accessible.

Tori will be doing research, handling a lot of our social media, and taking over the blog for the next few weeks, as well as making an episode of her own in August, and we are so happy to have her.