Proliferations

Proliferation of Bailey Szustak’s artwork: Hands Through Time, by Monique Tschofen; for more poster proliferations of Bailey’s art, please click HERE.

By Ada Jaarsma

Feminist Making, Doing & Sensing is a collection that emerged out of a series of workshops. Lauren Guilmette and Lynne Huffer hosted the first of these workshops, an arts-based interactive two-day workshop that took place in 2022 in conjunction with the annual meeting of the feminist philosophy association, philoSOPHIA. (Rachel Jones was the generous host of the conference that year at George Mason University).

The following year, the workshop took on another incarnation, led by Lauren and held in conjunction with that year’s philoSOPHIA meetings (generously hosted by Elizabeth Paquette and Andrea Pitts at UNC Charlotte). We reflect on the value of these kinds of workshops in a blog post, “In Praise of Experimental Workshops,” at the APA Blog for Women in Philosophy.

These details seem important to share here because of how they express something that we’ve been thinking about as proliferations.

Many happenings occurred, during these workshops, that sparked attention to the forms by which making occurred: forms like interactive exercises (Qrescent Mali Mason), like the role of sound in poetics (Travis Holloway), like the textures and assemblage of collage (Lynne Huffer), like the soul of food and food politics (Taryn Jordan), like the orienting towards creating a Black feminist oracle deck (Amanda Bennett), and so on.

These happenings sometimes gave rise to artifacts that, in important ways, held promise as the beginnings of new happenings. For example, Qrescent Mali Mason led participants in a philosophical exercise that culminated in making “hands” out of paper. Folks were invited to weave, tuck, and arrange their paper hands into an impromptu sculpture.

This artifact, a sculpture made out of paper hands, became the cover art of Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing, made by Bailey Szustak. (See a time-lapse video of the creation of this art here). Bailey participated in the Charlotte experimental making workshop and became an inaugural artist-in-residence at philoSOPHIA in 2024, at Mount Royal University in Calgary (co-hosted by Ada Jaarsma and Lauren Guilmette).

This proliferation gave rise to many more.

Bailey re-created the art in the form of a LEGO sculpture which became an art-installation at the 2024 philoSOPHIA conference.

Artists took up an invitation to make more proliferations, employing a range of media like spoken word, digital art, mixed media and collage, and cyanotype.

Here is an invitation for you to make more proliferations: this includes a PDF of the art, as well as suggestions for how to make your own version.