Hayashi Wilder 2026

Abstract

bodymemory geography is a series of abstract, large-scale textile monuments created with traditional Black craft techniques and materials and activated through ecological performances. The body of work speculates and translates the visual poetics and affects of skyscapes imagined in Black feminist literature as geographies of struggle, mapping bodily and epistemological abstractions that occur in the undoing and becoming of Black diasporic environments and experiences. The stories reimagined in this series are Sula by Toni Morrison, Passing by Nella Larsen, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Each monument reflects, through the visual language of abstraction and performance, a direct quote that references and relates to the ecological affects of the sky, a geographic poetic within the Black diaspora; enslavement and its afterlife. The quotes are as listed below: Sula by Toni Morrison“Perhaps Sula answered them even then, for it began to rain…Nel left the cemetery with the sunset in her face. Passing by Nella Larsen: “On Tuesday morning a dome of grey sky rose over the parched city, but the stifling air was not relieved by the silvery mist that seemed to hold a promise of rain, which did not fall.” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs: “Then he went away, and I was left with my thoughts—starless as the midnight darkness around me.”