Amber Doe

Self Portrait

Self Portrait, 2002, 61″ x 34,” Organic cotton rope, metal hoops.

Self Portrait is a reaction to not feeling at home in my own home (country). In an attempt to transmute my outsider status I looked to the spider. A fearsome, magical creature that can create its home anywhere. I made my own home/reflection. Cotton a cash crop, my ancestors a cash crop. Lynching rope. American wealth as rope. Unraveled and reshaped into my image.

Photo by Jeffry Scott

Ho for Shame: All of history is in my body

Ho! For Shame! S.S. All of history is in my body, printed linen, dried flowers, kanekalon, shaved wood. 192cm x 134cm.

Ho! For Shame! S.S. All of history is in my body is the main sail.

“Are black women still the beached whale of the sexual universe, un- voiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb” (Spillers 1984, 74). These words from Hortense Spillers’s famous 1984 essay “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” continue to resonate in our twenty-first-century moment. What Spillers articulates in this phrase is the persistent connection drawn between black women, animality, and sexuality that has long troubled feminist scholars. Spillers argues that slavery and its legacy produce black women as an animalistic other, “the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world. In this way, black women have traditionally been situated as repositories of the natural and unevolved.” – Christine Sharpe, In the Wake

In the work here in Rome I am interrogating my own liberation. Am I natural or unnatural? Who came before me struggling in the wake? Saartjie Baarman, my ancestors that actually came to live and work in Rome, Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy and Aethiops. I am liberating and caring for Saartjie. I am creating a womb for the lost wombs of Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy whose reproductive lives were stolen and uncredited for modern gynecology. I am liberating the baby version of myself that was not allowed on the church bus for being a “nigger.” In conjunction with this sail, Noah and I created an audio collaboration with my marine mammal kin, the dolphin, the whale. They sing to their babies in the womb so they will know their names, recognize their mom’s voice, the voices of their family. My mom sings to me, I sing to Ruby, my grandfather sang to my mom. We are traveling home.

AIA: All of History is in my body

All of history is in my body: AIA, italian lambswool, kanekalon, thread, dried flowers, paint, 119cm x 68cm x 2cm All of history is in my body: AIA is my sail. I wanted to make something beautiful, delicate, fragile, precious. All of the things I have been told black women are not. The accompanying piece is "Black Woman's Coral (1), it's my hand, it is the living ocean. View the video of the piece here.