Synclaire Butler’s practice focuses on identity and experience through movement, curation, audio recording, collage, poetry, social practice projects, and photography. As a multimedia artist, they explore race, gender, and sexuality in varying contexts. To address these topics, Butler’s work is often created out of their own life experiences as both the witness and narrator. They explore the lack of representation of queer communities and communities of color in juxtaposition with the creation and retelling of new inclusive realities. Whether viewing their visual work, listening to one of their sound atmospheres, or participating in one of their interactive social projects, Butler’s viewers are invited into a kaleidoscope of story and process. Although much of their work is rooted in critical theory, allowing for interdisciplinary art, their background as an activist, Alaskan, sister, birthworker, beekeeper, and earth keeper also inform and compliment many of their artistic choices.
My artistic choices reflect an understanding that my personal experiences are informed by my political identities: descendant of enslaved Africans, Queer, gender fluid, and survivor of sexual violence. My work serves as a space to explore, make sense of, and transcend the convergence of these identities and experiences. I have a deep desire to tell my story and make visible who I am, who my ancestors were and who my Black, Queer, survivor, and Diasporic communities are. These desires drive my practice and process. My practice moves through a variety of media -from movement, to audio recording, to poetry, to collage, to photography- as I pursue to tell a story. Often times, my work combines all the media above in order to reflect the kaleidoscopic character of my identity.
My debut poetry collection, From the Guts of a Black Dyke Butterfly (2018) is a bio-mythographical styled poetry zine. a biomythography, created and first introduced by Black Lesbian Feminist Poet Muva Audre Lorde, is a genre of writing that curates all that autobiographies, biographies, and mythologies are, while also disrupting all they may be. it is a way for Black womxn to hold space and tell our stories from the experiences of our myriads of selves. the collection is full of motifs and references to Lorde’s legacy and other Black feminists who have made my work possible through their commitment to create and archive their lives; and in turn, documented the lives and herstories/histories of our communities.
Art remains a tool of how we share our lives and archive our herstory/history. I encourage readers to realize that within my poems I am calling for a remembrance of the interconnectedness we share with each other as humans and living beings on this planet. I believe in the historical healing my artistic voice can make in resolving not only my own families intergenerational trauma, but the collective trauma of our shared histories.
In the ongoing multimedia series Y(Our) Girls, Too, beginning its initial exhibition in 2017, I use my blood as paint to explore diaspora, girl, and Blackness as political identities. The series responds to the lack of urgency and media for the still many missing Chibok schoolgirls of Nigeria while painting a story of the connection we share as humans through devastation, family, loss, and bleeding.
Currently my work also the photo-audio series Eden explores a coming together of Queerness and Blackness in a response to the lack of representation of these intersecting identities. It also addresses the institution of Christianity, coming from my experience of being raised understanding that the God my family prays to condemns my loving nor does he look like me. As I allow myself to process these identities, my interdisciplinary artistic process also unfolds.
