ARTIST STATEMENT
My work aligns bodies, trees, and land in performative residues. I am both an embodiment of intergenerational ecological and colonial violence, as a descendent of loggers, and the inheritor of intergenerational sexual trauma. These violences are tied directly to the setting of the Pacific Northwest. Both body and land are regularly violated without due regard for their respective agencies. These works reveal and position the body and the land as sites of remembrance, rootedness, resistance, and resolve.
Growing up in the woods, I felt the eyes of those hidden creatures who live within them. It is an exhilarating, terrifying sensation. There are unknown, autonomous worlds within the woods. Through various holding gestures, such as placing my naked body within landscape, exploring trauma through handwritten notes, and exploring the physicality of mulch and mosses, I expose a human body in the way that nature itself is exposed. I become part of the paradoxical magic joy and deep fear that I first felt among the trees and eyes. I am interweaving my body with place. Through this interwoven relationship, I am able to become an active and vulnerable subject within my own story, while recognizing and honoring the agency of the other living organisms.
Making these remnants is a meditation, a compulsion, a necessity. It is the way I attempt to understand the violence that was done to me. It is a reckoning of the violence my family has inflicted upon the land. It is an attempt to re-create an archive for the silenced stories the woods and my family share.
Using my own personal and family history as departure points, I ask: What would it take to fully recognize the debt that my family owes to itself and the land?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rebecca Sexton is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who grew up in Washington surrounded by Western Red Cedars, Douglas Firs, and Western Hemlocks. In her artistic practice, Sexton examines the effects of grief, gendered violence, and resource extraction on her own family and the land. Sexton also conducts research into how personal histories intertwine with public histories. These hidden inheritances center both practices. In her master’s thesis, “Ecologies of Inheritance: Tending the Ghosts of My Family Archive,” Sexton juxtaposed historical photographs of the timber industry alongside her own family’s archive in an attempt to exorcise these haunted pasts.
She earned a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (Annapolis), an MFA in Studio Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.
