ARTIST STATEMENT
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My roots spread across the earth. My fingerprints caress every community’s embrace. Their residue like tiny poems begging to leave each place better than it was found. I grew up in a multicultural family and moved around many times. I would spend long summers with my family in China. I barely grasped the language and struggled to keep up in conversation. Even when I was in places where I did know the language fluently, sometimes I was too shy to speak. I learned instead to sink into the space between words. A vast world of images, movements, and feelings that don’t quite land in speech. I created my own vocabulary and art was my dictionary. Image became a medium to express my story and connect with others across many barriers. Through trauma and grief and joy, art stuck with me. It was a way to process experiences too devastating to name as much as it was a way for me to share my love with others.
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Art shapeshifted many times. As a child, it was drawing the same sunset every day. It was wrapping my dolls like mummies with yarn. It was tracing lines on the landscape with ice skates. It was daydreaming about a more just world. In college, it was chaotic paintings. It was delicate paper sculptures. It was collections of similar objects. It was video interviews seeking to understand. It was sharing food with others. And it grew. Art became a socially engaged practice. It was interactive objects and environments. It blurred the line between performance and conversation. It was dancing in public. It was weaving together stories. It was finding integration in my own. Today, art is a way for me to time travel between many places and states. My practice is building and archiving a universe uncovering many characters in their diverse narratives and the landscapes that hold them all.
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Artist BIO
周杰意 Jiéyì Zhou is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and educator using expressive meaning-making and civic engagement practices to shift our cultures towards a more inclusive, diverse, and beautiful future. Jiéyì takes a holistic approach to making and teaching by beginning with audience. They believe that it is their life's work to show people how to make friends with their feelings so that we may all better play and imagine and take care of ourselves, each other, and the planet. They hold an MFA in 4d art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they focused on socially-engaged arts practices. While in Wisconsin, they collaborated with the ArtWrite Collective on the power of art and social justice for the sake of generating new options and new possibilities in the world. As a teaching artist, they have developed visual arts and arts-integrated STEM, maker, and civic engagement curriculum for the the Madison Children’s Museum, the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the Madison Public Library, Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Public Library, and ArtsCorp. Their current teaching artist practice utilizes character and environment to generate civic imaginations of a shared future. In 2016, they moved to Seattle, Washington and began to develop a universe exploring the habitats of our emotional diasporas. In 2018, they had a successful Kickstarter campaign to publish Trifecta, a set of one-poem-long books illustrated line by line. Jiéyì lives in a collective house in Seattle, Washington and likes to dance wildly in the kitchen.