Xenia

Xenia- a word that means both hospitality and friendship.
The cognate word xenos holds within it both “stranger” and “friend.” From it we inherit the word xenophobia—the fear of the stranger—and the lesser-known xenophilia—the love of what is strange, or of what remains unknown.

I think we are all very familiar with what it is like to meet a stranger in the world. How it might feel scary or exciting to encounter someone new. We are certain to bring certain preconceptions or prejudgments to this encounter. In many cases we might find delight in finding our preconceptions to be wrong. Sometimes the pathway to understanding each other can be messy or fraught with misunderstandings. It is my sincere hope that we can engage in these encounters with a level of safety and respect that allows the vulnerability necessary to navigate together.

I think it is interesting how familiar we are with the idea of xenophobia and not xenophilia. In our culture we are so much more afraid of the unknown than loving and welcoming of it.

My art practice often begins intuitively. Even if I start with a clear image in mind it almost always strays and ends up somewhere different. To me this mirrors what it is often like to walk through a conversation, a day, a life. For as we know, best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. I have learned to welcome the twists and turns instead of holding too tightly to my plans.

One of the greatest surprises of all though in my work has been to greet the stranger within myself. At first when a drawing came out so differently than I had planned I felt scared or even ashamed. Always seeing my work as a mirror to myself I thought what I found was creepy and weird or perhaps darker than I present myself to the world. I began to get more familiar with my shadow self and it’s shyer emotions, desires and instincts. How exciting and refreshing though to find that I am not stagnant and predictable, that I am porous and contradictory and strange. How incredible to have learned all this from making art! I think I originally thought that making art was about sharing my thoughts with others. I am delighted to find that it is also the method of discovering what my thoughts and feelings sometimes are in the first place. So much truth can be found in the art making process.

Poet David Whyte calls poetry “the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. That perhaps, to begin with, were afraid to want to know and that you allow yourself to understand. Friendship with the deeper underlying phenomena beneath the surface self.” 

I also love this quotation from a lecture by physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad:
When two hands touch, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the other nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer. And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an uncanny sense of the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of the stranger within? So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others — other beings, other spaces, other times — are aroused.