Shame Playground - 2025
30" x 18"
Cardboard, plaster, wool batting, doll fabric, hand-dyed wool roving, embroidery floss, stop-motion animation
 
Shame Playground offers the somatic effects of curiosity as a strategy for navigating the shame of ugly inheritances, like white supremacy and colonialism. As a white settler in America, I wonder: what changes about my relationships to self and to others if shame-navigation becomes a desirable activity, or even a neutral one? How does my connection to global and local injustice change when I am accountable to and give care to the ugliest parts of me?
 
What would it mean for my community if every member understood themselves as radically multiplicitous, and reached a level of acceptance and authorship to their own unique potential to both grow something good but also to harm? I see curiosity as tactic, function, and liberation towards these ends. Understanding that shame acts as a barrier to healing, accountability, and values-aligned living, I offer Shame Playground as a practice ground for curiosity.
 
Go ahead- approach the shame, and take a peek inside.