Renascent
This video installation reveals intimate and ritualized interactions with a found coyote, including ceremonially preparing her body, bathing her and skinning her. For me this process mirrors the life, death and rebirth cycle.
Part of what I’m doing is interacting with another animal body to reveal mirrored aspects of my own.
Part of what I’m doing is trying to forge a bond with nature that at some point in my lifetime, and our evolutionary process, was lost.
Part of what I’m doing is acknowledging how little control we actually have over these natural forces- time, change, aging, death.
Part of what I’m doing is trying to recognize what we can choose to have control over- destruction, transformation, creation.
Ecologically, the coyote can represent the southwest, the desert. Mythologically, the coyote represents the trickster, the shapeshifter, the creature of benevolent chaos. Symbolically, the coyote represents the psyche: elusive, highly adaptable, unpredictable. Personally, the coyote represents a version of ourselves; a shadow within which must be respected, revisioned and re-birthed.