‘Ancestral Grammar’ exhibit will show African, Mexican migration through historic materials

Tucson artist Amber Doe works in a lot of mediums: sculpture, textiles, dyes, performance and more. Her latest work will incorporate dance and movement, too — telling a story of migration and how African and Mexican cultures have mixed.

It’s called “Ancestral Grammar,” and it began for her last year when she went to Oaxaca, Mexico, to research the indigo plant.

Doe told The Show more about her project.

Full conversation

AMBER DOE: My initial interest in indigo as a plant came through my maternal uncle doing our family history a really long time ago, pre-Google, pre-internet almost, just kind of archival work. And he found out that part of our family originated from a plantation that had indigo and rice and cotton as its main commodities. So I kind of became curious about this plant and the fact that it has a relationship across the planet.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s back up then and talk about your work in general. You are an interdisciplinary artist. You work in many different mediums, but you often work with textiles and in sculpture. And you use things that are really interesting, like palm fronds. There are ropes here, like cotton ropes, flowers. Sometimes you use hair extensions, right? Tell us about the things that you use and why.

DOE: I think that if I wasn’t an artist, I would be a historian. I think above all, I’m a bit of a history nerd, and I like to use materials as a metaphor. So if I am in the work, I’m trying to tell a story about a person or a narrative or a way that something came to be. I find that it’s really important to use the natural environment to tell part of the story and then to tell kind of the human connection to that story.

I love textile as a medium just because it was traditionally seen as women’s work. And we have such a long history of textile production within the United States that it’s a way for me to place myself in a historical context, always telling some sort of hidden story. And textile is my way in, traditionally.

LAUREN GILGER: So this piece, this most recent piece you’re working on, called “Ancestral Grammar,” you said is a continuation of an earlier project that is really pretty extensive called “Tactile Cosmology.” I’m looking at the images of this, and I would love for you to describe it for the audience, because this is radio, but it involves photographs and kind of where they’re placed, right?

DOE: Yes. Tactile cosmology came about in a way because I was also kind of studying our relationship to the natural world through the formal sciences of geology, zoology, paleontology, and how all of those sciences are essentially an offset of sort of mining, extraction, all of these sort of things that take place and what they produce.

And so even studying the people that worked in there, with “Tactile Cosmology,” I was interested in something called Lowell cloth, and it was also called slave cloth at one point. Just recognizing that at every facet of life, this thing that is the first thing that touches our body when we come out of our birth canal, essentially is something that has a history, has a story, and it tells us a lot about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

LAUREN GILGER: So how does this relate to your own story?

DOE: I think that it relates to my own story because in alignment with my uncle’s research, when I was younger and hearing about rice, indigo and cotton, I did an earlier piece called “Self Portrait,” that is essentially composed of cotton rope that I’ve unraveled. I made the tubing that gives it the shape of kind of like a hoop skirt of that era in time, kind of antebellum South looking.

And I did it in the material that it’s in to be a reflection of my descendants. Like if I was considered descended from a cash crop as a person, at the same time as materials like tobacco and cotton were, I wanted to see what that would look like in a different material and how that could shape how we feel about ourselves in relationship to the concept of material in general.

Liz Duncan

LAUREN GILGER: It’s a beautiful piece. And it’s interesting that it’s called “Self Portrait,” because, of course, it doesn’t look like you. But it does evoke that hoop skirt and has such a shape to it since. So describe for us what ancestral grammar might look like going forward. This sounds like it’ll involve a story map. You’ve got textiles involved, obviously, as well?

DOE: I do have textile involved, and it always kind of starts in my head from there. But there’s going to be a lot more movement, I would say, with “Ancestral Grammar. Being based in the Southwest. My daughter is enrolled in folklórico programs. And so her teachers kind of explained to us all these different regions of Mexico that I didn’t know about coming from the East Coast.

And some of them have a really traditional African connection to them. Because at one point there were more enslaved people in Mexico than there were even in the United States, which I didn’t know about until pretty recently. And knowing that that sort of informed the costumes, informs the movements and informs the music, some of the things that my daughter’s learning made me more fascinated.

So there’s going to be choreographed pieces that sort of complement the textiles, which I see as a screen. I’m going to have movement in front of them, have props in front of them, have some video in front of them at different points. So it does feel like a journey. That journey is definitely a migration.

So sort of coming from the Doors of no Return, symbolically, that coast off of West Africa leading us to new coast, and then finally leading us to desert landscapes.

LAUREN GILGER: So, yes, the migration there. I love that idea of combining something like folklórico, this traditional Mexican dance that you said your daughter is taking, with these kinds of textile sculptural elements that you do. This is what you mean when you say you’re an interdisciplinary artist?

DOE: Absolutely, yes. I will use almost whatever medium I can get my hand on to tell a fuller story.

LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, then, how this fits into the picture of your broader work in general? I’m reading here that your work is something called trans species ancestor worship. Describe that for us.

DOE: That is because in all of my work — and specifically with something like ancestral grammar or tactile cosmology — since I’m talking about migration, there’s always a migration that takes place not just in a human form or the human realm, but also animals. And I think a lot about sea mammals, for example, and how they sort of mimic our placement, like their pathways across the Atlantic.

And how there’s a belief that the gray whale, for some reason disappeared for a while, host the transatlantic slave trade. So what happened to this disappearing species that kind of fell along with us on this pathway? So there’s some kind of a sea element to take us from our beginning point at the Doors of no Return and take us to this desertscape where you have — I’m using feathers from birds that are native to these parts of the country to sort of show this migration we kind of all make. And it’s supernatural, and it’s something that is standard in terms of human and world history. We all migrate.

LAUREN GILGER: We all migrate. All right, we will end on that note. That is Amber Doe, an interdisciplinary artist joining us. She is one of the nine recipients of MOCA Tucson’s Grants for Artists program. We’ve been talking about her upcoming project for that called “Ancestral Grammar.” Amber, thank you. Thank you for telling us about this.

DOE: Thank you so much.