Episode 10: “Watering For Now” by Zoe Scruggs

Transcription:

My weird fun fact about myself is that if I like was at the peak of my career, the most busy that I could be doing anything, my art career has blown up, my music is taking over the world, if I got a call that was like “we need you to be on a Muppets movie set tomorrow”, I would drop everything and feature in a Muppets movie. [MUSIC] 

My name is Zoe. I use she/her pronouns. I live in Delaware and I am a multidisciplinary artist. So I paint and I make music primarily, but I also like write and make video works and kind of like freelance in all the types of mediums, podcasts, editing, video editing, stuff like that, content creation.

A lot of my art work is rooted in being a Black person in America and like looking at the ways that labor gets intertwined. In my work, I'm thinking a lot about the interconnectedness of like all the different forms of oppression of how climate change is related to anti-Blackness is related to exploitation under capitalism is related to heteropatriarchy and I do that through representing my own relationship to nature and to agriculture work. [SOUNDS OF RUSTLING LEAVES]

I had been working on different farms, Black owned or organic or biodynamic since like 2018 and so a lot of my work during that time was explicitly documenting my time there and now I'm moving into more of like a reflective space where I'm like “what were the things that were positive, what were the things that were really terrible about those experiences” since I'm like a little bit removed from that work I feel like I've just been reflecting on what are the things that brought me to farming, what are the like political ideas that are important that float around why I was attracted to farming. And so I'm kind of just like figuring out what that means in my work as of now and letting my art practice be a process of working through those ideas and documenting what it looks like to try to hold all those different ideas in one place.

In the work that I submitted I was thinking about like the ways that nature is healing to me, the ways that I get joy out of like working with nature, taking care of plants, that type of thing. And then how there's also like a tension with the history of agriculture work because of slavery for Black people specifically and in a lot of times where I’m working on farms, I feel like I can feel that tension a lot where I've worked on farms or something racist is said or something that evokes slavery is said by somebody who should not be evoking slavery and I have to like wrestle with that. I have to wrestle with like this whole legacy of tending to the soil on this land in a body like mine. And I feel like the pieces that I submitted are like kind of off-putting but also beautiful. They have like super bright colors but there's also something quirky or weird about them that I feel speaks to this unsettled feeling that I have in my relationship to nature. [MUSIC]

I have to navigate capitalism and anti-Blackness and the impending doom of the climate crisis as an artist in my life and it's like those ideas are so overwhelming, um, that I can't help but for that to leak into the work that I’m making and that manifest in a bunch of different ways. Like I don't live in a world where there is like a basic income and so I have to pay up for my art practice in this like system that exploits me while making work about this system that exploits me in this history that affects me. And so it's this weird thing where I have to like, I mean everybody who works, everybody, even if you don't work has to like figure out how they're navigating these systems and some of us are like, “I want to change the way that we're living through the world” and it just makes everything feel weird and wonky and inconsistent and confusing and so I feel like I get to work through that confusion in my art practice. I've been doing this like study group with anti-capitalists for artists and they're running a study group about anti-capitalism and we're trying to figure out how we could do a project together and that's something I'm excited about now because it feels like a more literal way of like “how do you have these political beliefs and are an artist”. Can you change the way that we show each other our art, can we change the way we gather around art in the name of like the world I want to live in in the future and starting there creatively? I want to live in a world that is not worried about a climate crisis, is not worried about like violence against other people. How do we come together as artists and then make art so that we're making the art that we want to be in that new world and creating that new world through that art?

I often paint myself and like family members, family friends in my work if there's people in the work and that feels like a direct way of honoring myself and loved ones is like being able to sit and recreate our likenesses in these little worlds I'm imagining. It's like I'm dedicating the work I'm doing to myself and my loved ones. I feel like the people that I care about the most, like I have the most fun drawing. [SOUNDS OF DRAWING]

My art is a lot about just like researching and observing. And so I draw a lot from like Black feminist writings, or like Afro-Futurist text, or Black feminist artists like Faith Ringgold, but then also like my mom. We were going on walks in our state parks during the summer and there would be just so many times when my mom would be like, “when we're looking out at the ocean it just reminds you like how small we are and like, how like so much of the stuff we're worrying about throughout the day doesn't really matter like that all goes away when we're out near the ocean or in the woods.” And I just thought that was really cool that those were like the natural ideas and conversations that were coming up out of us spending time in nature together, that we were like producing our own knowledge around nature and what it can do for us. I'm always down to start talking about the climate crisis because I feel like I've had access to the people who are hopeful that we can still navigate out of it or around it or through it, but my siblings have so much sadness around it still and I feel like I pay attention to the ways that we’re like all unconsciously suffering because of it. I'm always learning and listening, listening and learning. 

When I was farming more it would be weird because like there would be certain days where like, I would go out and touch the dirt and I would just be like “the message of the day is that like our water is sacred”, and then I would just sit down and have time to like do a monotonous task in the dirt and I would be like “water is really important today and every day”, like it would just click and so that's a generational wisdom in itself— the dirt.

I don't know when this will come out, um, but I am either having or had a solo show at the Delaware Contemporary Museum in my home state. And I bring that up because in my meeting about it, I was referred to as a landscape artist and I think that that's cool because I still work with figures, I work with abstraction, but I’ve like been able to weasel my way into like some people think of me as a landscape artist even though I don't follow any of the landscaping, landscape art conventions because I’ll put a big old body in a landscape painting and be like “confront this body in this landscape” um, and that's kind of a little space I've been able to make for myself which I think is cool. [MUSIC]

MUSIC & SOUNDS USED:

Theme music : Water Fluid - Music by ItsWatR from Pixabay

Hand digging dirt, leaves crunch: Sound Effect by SpliceSound from Pixabay

Ocean waves 06: Sound Effect by deffyme from Pixabay

Pen Strokes and Scribbling: Sound Effect by Sheyvan from Pixabay