play as art

Sup✌🏻

I’m woods, and I’m a sick crip mad neuro* nonbinary trans lesbian white settler. Sort of a mouthful, but here we are!

I’m a death witch, hauntélegist, service designer, and play artist. We’ll get into all of the above, but right now, I want to talk about my work as a play artist.

Image description: woods stands with their left leg on the bathroom sink. They are wearing black jogger type pants with dirt on the knee. They are wearing a Nike sports bra and a blonde curled wig with a grey beanie. Their phone case is filled with different patterned smiley face stickers. They have black nail polish on. They are leaning against the wall with their arm in a triangle type shape with their hand resting on their beanie. Their right elbow rests on their knee. You can see two towel bars in this black and white photo.

To play is to flow among cycles of creation and completion; of indulgent diligence and diligent indulgence - but never discipline. It is recess always - not recess separated by gender or Google Calendar.

I’ve been trying to sum up the processes of death and rebirth, death and rebirth, death and rebirth…you get it - that I’ve been cycling through for the past year, and I think I’m able to narrow it down to two videos - point A to point B.

Now, there’s about 4 Google Drives, 4 websites, 4 platforms, 4 hard drives with 5 terabytes of data, 5-going-on-7 notebooks, 5 boxes of NC-rain-ruined papers, over 62 paintings, 17 small and 5 large poster boards, 3 personal tarot decks and ideas for 3 general tarot decks, almost 600 voice notes, 2 full laptops and 1 full phone (largely of photos and videos), childhood and family photos, two (2) 32GB and one (1) 64GB SD cards, a full Adobe Creative Cloud, a full Canva account, a MindMap website, a SimpleBooklet site, and one other thing I’m forgetting right now that comprise this actual spiral of processes.

It makes more sense if you know I have two yods in my birth chart, like Prince. They’re usually called the “fingers of god” but I like to call them the “middle fingers of god.” We’ll talk about it some other time, but I think it provides some context for all of this. In other words, I have an insatiable need to create.

At its core, being a play artist - for me - is a process of choosing to live into myself and my desires through praxis rooted in transformative justice, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, abolition, anarchy, healing justice, neuro* justice, and disability solidarity.

Enough yapping! The second video was a beautiful discussion about the nonbinary transition to and from le corpse poétique to le corps poétique and the occupied to the preoccupied flow state, but I feel like this will translate better this way anyways.

[Point a] physical economy of movement: a dissertation

In this video, woods is wearing sweatpants and a longline sports bra and an adidas beanie. They are on the ground with grass and the night sky behind them. At the end of the video, Benson, a black, white, and brown Dalmatian/Rottweiler walks into the frame.

[point b] le corpse poétique gains remote control

It’s loud turn your volume down!

In this video, woods is wearing a beanie, a sweatshirt, and black jogger type pants with climbing boots and fuzzy socks. There is a floral/abstract rug on the floor, a table pushed out of the way, and blinds covering a window in the background.

We have plenty to discuss, but I’m going to let the work speak for itself, at least for this post.