MARKINGS INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD

Recently, while I waited in a long line, I looked at the wall of my neighborhood bar with all the tags and stickers. To my mind came caves and the millenary markings that can be found in some of them. I thought of streetlamps full of stickers. These intentional ways of leaving a trace behind that communicate with people you don’t know seemed like a sort of analog message board of a pre social media world.

Days later, as I kept reflecting on the subject, other layers came to mind. A relationship to the place and materials that was crucial to the mark making and its message. A sensorial experience where materials are an active part of the process and the interaction between person and material is essential for the creation of meaning. Mark making is an essential human action and one of the earliest forms of expression. They can be additive as when you add paint or layer textures onto a surface. Or they can be reductive as when you carve or chisel on metal. Marks not only represent and communicate ideas, but are a process that shapes how we think and shape our world through the interaction with materials. The layers of stickers, hearts, and symbols on the bathroom stall made me think of how certain artists engage with materials. How they create textures, add and carve. Through this process they create worlds, map identity, and claim the space to be themselves.

The first time I saw Sulo Bee’s work, the colorful gritty surfaces attracted me. They evoked the color palettes of some of my favorite childhood cartoons and the huge sticker collection I carried everywhere in a puffy white binder mixed with the sensibility of the streetlamps full of years of stickers and skater punk culture of my teenage years. Sulo Bee’s work seemed like something you would find in another realm. An amulet or magical trinket full of possibilities.

Over the years, these layered sticker pieces that I first encountered have evolved to intricate overlay of mixed materials full of intentionally carved lines and amorphous three-dimensional shapes. Connected by rubber tubes and an accumulation of sparkling dust, the pieces themselves are a mark. A play with materials that is the process for imagining and creating another world. Creature maker and world builder, Sulo Bee creates characters and forms that populate the alternate realm of $P$RKLE_FILTH_CLOUD_NIN3. In a recent artist talk at Fried Fruit Gallery, Sulo talks of their process. In laser cut steel soldered constructions they layer paint then they carve. Sulo shares how they are constantly doing material research, becoming very involved in their surroundings. Picking up things that they find. They enjoy the process of gathering and exploring materials letting the object speak to them about what it wants to become.

Using the elliptical shape of necklaces, Sulo’s latest work has grown in size, taking space while still inhabiting an in-betweenness between object and jewel. Alongside their pieces in this alternate realm, Sulo asserts who they are while creating a space where they inhabit in fullness the liminality of their identity. Sulo incorporates druzy dust, stones, and a mixture of textures that focus on repair and mending, mirroring their relationship with themselves without focusing on trauma. The work is bright and fun while the writing is dark. The tension of seemingly disparate elements creates a world where the fragmentation of the self can coexist and queer identities flourish. The work is imbued with magic.

Also, colorful and eye-catching, J Diamond’s recent work engages with surface textures and materials to mark a path, a map of identity. J’s work during her MFA focused on material legacies and the harm they still cause to Black people today. As she mentioned in a talk during the SNAG conference last summer, objects such as glass dishware or cotton, associated with the violent anti-Black legacies of the confederacy in the American South, are imbued with a material double consciousness as a result. Amongst this body of work, J addresses a branding tool and badge and how they have been used historically to mark the body. By focusing on these objects, J sought to make visible how the intergenerational trauma of anti-blackness is still present materially in a society constructed on this violence. This work was crucial for the pieces that she has created in the years since, in which she focuses on the radiance and beauty of Black aesthetics. Using and transforming materials imbued with the experiences of resistance within histories of adornment and beauty rituals, J found a path to map another route of her experience.

During a residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, J started finding lost braids and weaves of hair on the floor. For J, these lost braids evoked the person that once wore them. They also reminded her of the first time she felt the joy of gender euphoria when her sister-in-law put braids in her hair. After experimenting with form, she started seeing how the braids carried the past in their materiality. All that was held by the braids led her to engage with the potentiality of the surfaces. J styled the colorful hair pieces into loops and twists that are recognizable parts of Black beauty aesthetics and a means of self-transformation. In her recent pieces the braids are combined with looped strings of hearts like those you doodle on a notebook, or on a bathroom wall.

Surfaces that can perform and map identities. They are bodies where transformation occurs. By layering paint and combining it with threads and braids, J flips and plays with what is expected or assumed of an object. Through the nickel plating of silver and the powder coating of pearls, she makes us stop and question what is expected of queer identities. As J maps her identity, she traces a new route that leads to a place where she can joyfully question the assumptions of who we are because of how we are expected to look and present to others.

One of the restroom stalls in my neighborhood bar has a big red heart loosely drawn that connects to some organic shapes that seem like letters but are not. Underneath someone added in blue some lines and ‘LS’. I imagined them, maybe talking to each other, maybe letting me and everyone that came through that intimate space know that they had been there. The marks are random and fast, claiming the place that surrounds the squeak of the marker on the aluminum door. A surface full of potential like the clay in caves became a medium to think and forge who they were. Like the marks by both Sulo Bee and J Diamond.

The material engagement in both Sulo and J’s pieces is an ongoing process that allows for them to claim the space to assert their queer identities. The strength of their pieces comes from this active relationship with materials that produces meaning. It becomes a way for them to think of the spaces they inhabit. Create them. Map them. And they invite us to be part of these worlds. A world where we get to live freely and joyfully in all the fullness of who we are.