Lydia Cheshewalla

Bio:

Lydia Cheshewalla is a transdisciplinary artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the ecological landscape of North American prairielands. As an Osage woman, her work primarily focuses on community, emotional awareness, environmental justice, ephemerality, relationship, and art as remediation. She is currently working on becoming.

Artist Statement:

I consider myself to be an environmental and ephemeral artist with a transdisciplinary research practice guided by Indigenous ways of Knowing/Being/Doing/Relating. I believe in a soft revolution, which I define as a series of choices one makes with collective evolution towards greater kinship in mind. The work I make is responsive to what surrounds me as well as my visions for the future. I strive to create work that is willing to engage “what if?”, that inspires curiosity, and that is comfortable with nuance. I treat my art as a powerful tool capable of transforming both my inner and outer worlds, creating access points for imagination - portals through which one can connect to new ideas. My work likes to play with others and I often find myself collaborating with friends and flowers alike. A talented photographer, a prairie sunset, and a mirror can turn a moment of playfulness into an eternity of curiosity. Another set of hands is often what we need to achieve our goals and I think it’s important to remember that not all of our artistic collaborators are human. A tree has its own story, yet what is our shared language? My work seeks to explore questions like these. I enjoy the unknown and think we should all flirt with mystery a little more. When I observe the world around me, what I see most clearly as a truth is ephemerality, change, and flux. In my practice, I work with and in ephemerality as one way to address art pollution and scarcity-based value systems. I find value in the abundance of the mundane. I believe there is wisdom in looking closely, slowly, and intentionally at our environments. My practice tends to elevate the humble object, or perhaps rightfully restores our wonderment and reverence for our relationships to all things. At the heart of my collaborations with people, places, plant and mineral kin is the desire to learn, understand, and respect - I enter spaces by first asking, “what is already here?” When working with land I like to work within an understanding of the ecosystem, avoiding acts of destruction that are outside the realm of beneficial disturbance. In collaboration with Jessica Price on the project Ephemeral Reliquaries, we have allowed our curiosity-driven research to take us to a flowing border, to an artificial ocean in the middle of a desert, and to a place where particles collide under prairieland. Together we are working to create visual stories that facilitate spatial intimacy, connections across time and distance. We can cross perceived borders by utilizing the liminal space where exchange occurs, the space where ecosystems overlap, the space between one thought and the next. Play and excitement are crucial to my practice. As an artist my goal is not necessarily to create an object that outlasts me, but to pass on a way of looking at and interacting with the world we are so gloriously born from in such a way that brings betterment to future generations.