Arts and liberation work
Conversation with Ancestors,
ink pens, acrylic paint, and soft textural papers, on paper, by Katriona Ilsedóttir, 2025
“Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.” Rev angel Kyodo williams, Sensei
Some may wonder what role the arts play in liberation work? When times are fraught and we are in the midst of multiple currents of danger and oppressive forces, how are the arts helpful to us?
Arts are a way to create rituals and ceremonies of personal and collective belonging. They also help us sense into what we feel and perceive, to be able to share and agitate for change.
Arts help us find our body wisdom, our body stories, our felt impressions that do not yet have word shapes. In this way, arts help us grow our intimacy with what we feel, need, know, long for and help us strengthen our voices - both in solo practice and in collective practice. This is supportive ground for sharing our knowing with others and for weaving actions of specific and tangible change in our lives, our relationships, our communities.
Arts are a pathway for soul nourishment, for re-membering our inner kinship, our kinship with ancestors, our relations with Earth and Sky, our wisdom currents, and our collective knowings. In times of mass gaslighting, in times of painful erosion of songs of the heart, in times of injurious exclusions, denigrations, and violations perpetrated by domination culture in its various guises, the arts can be a site of resistance, personal and collective.
Arts can be personal and collective forms of protest. Wise personal and collective commentaries and critiques. Teachings. Petitions. Celebrations. Calls to Action, to Participate, to wake up, to learn and shift together. Consider the ways that songs have been used as uprising and as comfort. And both are important in these times we are living in.
Public Arts bring this magic into the public domain. Like the Red Dress campaign - red dresses as installation art among the trees along a road, making visible the ongoing violent atrocity of missing and murdered Indigenous women. People disappeared yet visible. Pain and pride and resistance and a call to see and feel and act, woven through installation art. Like the art installations of children’s shoes on the Vancouver Art Gallery, to make visible and personal the atrocity of the mass murder of Indigenous children at Canadian Residential ‘schools.’ Arts help us feel together and that grows collective mobilizing for actions. Arts can also be a refusal to be invisible, silent. Arts are voice.
Arts can help tell important stories in evocative, potent ways that words alone may not be able to communicate.
Arts have an important role in personal and collective Liberation practices.
In her article, Poetry is Not a Luxury, Wise Ancestor, Audre Lorde, Black, Feminist, Lesbian Poet offers this teaching:
“Poetry...forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
Voyager
oil on canvas, by Katriona Ilsedóttir, 2025
’Widening the Vision’
by Rosemerry Trommer
Almost by accident
I saw through the blaze
of my anger and fear
to the bunny in the yard,
his sweet brown body
so still and attentive
in the short brown grass,
and it’s not that I
became any less angry,
but when I let myself be held
by his steady brown eye,
I was touched by gentleness,
and remembered what else
I am capable of. Oh self, this
is how you stay whole hearted —
by keeping your eyes wide open.
Eagle Poem
By Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.