I am based in Houston Texas, and I research and make in survival creativity.

Survival Creativity is defined less in words than the moves I always catch it doing out of the corner of my eye. I know it when I see it. Actually I know it because of a feeling in my body that happens when I see it:

The feeling is like air in a tight space, opening in a contraction, a burst of breeze, a loosening in the brain wrinkles, new flexibility in a stiffened joint, a big breath that fills up more space than your lungs were working with in the breath just before it. I make and collect examples of survival creativity from a range of concentric contexts - of how the imagination makes a way out of no way,

When I see it comes from all corners, sometimes in a drop tile strip mall, sometimes in a designated art space, sometimes in a memory from when I was eight, sometimes in a warehouse next to a dialysis center, sometimes in an improvised path next to a detention basin, sometimes in the song of humpback whale, sometimes in a thing made by a kid I teach, or in the magnet pull across space lifting the corners of both your mouths when a smile is contagious. Lots of them come from Robert Sapolsky’s examples in biology and neurobiology and from people of color, queer, and crip culture in oppressive systems. Examples span evolutionary adaptation, improvisations in art, and attunement leaps in care work because I believe in a model of creativity that is not wholly replaceable by algorithmic remixing.

In addition to making and collecting examples of survival creativity, most of my current work uses somatic (in the body) methods because this is how we can emancipate sensoriums, rerhythm nervous systems, and learn more possible movements than fight, flight, or freeze. Elaine Scarry describes, “Imagination is the ground of last resort.” Conditions that set our systems into hypo and hyperarousal are ripe for the imagination to desperately trigger creativity as a means of survival and cognitive survival, but I’m also especially interested in how mechanisms of creativity evolved in and adapted to dire circumstances can be carried through, realigned and generously related into great creativity that came come from safety, play, calm, pleasure, and curiosity. As Octavia Butler wrote -that latent hypercapacities exasperated under extreme conditions of oppression, abuse, or deprivation are supported to transition into superpowers that imagine and make new worlds of much different circumstances altogether

Above you see two versions of the Substructure Timelines for my work. The’re a tool for tracing back where public facing acts of creativity are sourced from in one’s life and ongoing practice. Or a way of peeking below the tip of the iceberg, and seeing the roots of a tree.