- [Aries] This doesn't have to look like anything, 'cause your grief doesn't have to look like anything.

Your relationships don't have to look like anything.

It feels really nice and really cool to help other people figure that out.

And I think that that does show in my creative practice too.

(gentle background music) My name is Aries Joe, I use they or he pronouns.

I am an artist and an organizer.

And I currently live in Oga Po'geh, which is unceded Tewa territory, colonially known as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And I'm from unceded Creek territory, colonially known as Clanton, Alabama.

I do nothing traditionally.

Everything about my life is non-traditional, including my art practice.

Before I understood myself more, my visual art, particularly my sculpture and body casting, was a way for me to try and understand and process those really challenging feelings about my body.

Those really challenging things that other people had told me about my body for my entire life.

And, yeah, a way for me to kind of come to terms with existing in this meat sack that I have, which I'm on better terms with it now.

And I think, yeah, my art is, my visual art at least, is a big part of that.

Also, my writing probably, but.

Then the theme really started to emerge that stayed with me for many, many years until pretty recently, and that was processing grief.

Because my mom died of suicide my freshman year of college at UAB, and that really impacted my whole world.

I didn't have access to good grief therapy.

I didn't have a great experience with the death care space at that time.

And I didn't have a way to process the fact that this constant in my life since childhood was suddenly gone.

And so, ephemerality and grief and loss and tangibility became in incredibly difficult for me to wrap my brain around.

And creating visual art, particularly sculpture, became a really important way for me to process that.

And process that grief and that loss and understand it in myself.

And it took so many years, this is what my work was about from my freshman year of college through grad school until just a few years ago.

And after working in the death care profession myself and learning more about it, it felt like a nice seal to that chapter of what I needed to think about all the time.

For a long time, my artwork and creative practice was about processing and understanding grief.

And now it's about processing and understanding joy.

I feel like where I live now and who I am now, being out, being my full self, being my whole self has allowed me to find my chosen family and find my community.

And it does make me want to give back, whether that's through holding a grief circle.

Or distributing harm reduction supplies and doing mutual aid work.

Or doing my job at New Mexico School for the Arts, where I'm helping kids get a tuition-free arts education.

All of that is thinking about community building, helping others, loving others.

And that's the baseline through all of it.

It all gets to be exactly what you want it to be.

And that is the most freeing thing to understand.

And maybe I had to, you know, run away to the desert and have some wide open spaces to figure that out.

When I moved to Santa Fe, one of the ways that I connected with community is through Wise Fool, which is the local circus art school.

I was like, I got to take this giant puppet making class.

A couple of my friends were in it.

And we were supposed to be making these giant puppets that could be about anything.

And at that moment in my life, I was really thinking about these dichotomies in myself of joy and grief, and masculine and feminine and non-binaryness.

And decided to, I wrote out this whole long prompt about the iridescence of life and our ability to hold multiple truths at the same time.

And thus Pearl, the giant puppet was born.

Pearl is a physical representation about how we can hold all of our truths at once.

And so, Pearl's face is sad and happy at the same time.

Or a little angry and a little excited.

And I used a lot of natural imagery.

So one of the hands is a seashell, one of the hands is a butterfly.

There's a lot of iridescent fabrics and shiny fabrics on Pearl because, yeah, that iridescence, that kind of shimmering quality is what I was looking for.

And that's what Pearl's named for as well.

I've always been a very silly person.

And my friends will tell you, I call myself and they call me lovingly a silly goose.

And that's who I am for sure.

And, you know, as I've come more to terms with who I am as a person, and I've wanted to bring that back into everything that I'm doing.

Including not just my house and my fashion and how I present myself in the world, but also my creative practice.

And that really has become about processing joy and giving myself permission to have joy in really difficult times in the world.

And to have joy in the face of grief.

And the truth that we can hold multiple emotions and multiple parts of ourselves that might be challenging or conflicting to each other.

We can hold all of that at once.

And that's really important to how I live my life now, for sure.

What I would tell my young self growing up in Clanton, Alabama, and knowing what's ahead of that person is, stay curious, hang in there.

And it doesn't have to look like anything.

(pleasant music)