Like me, my practice is fluid. Raised by missionary parents, I was shaped by a belief system rooted in rigid truths. Over time, I recognized the imperialist nature of that worldview and the harm it caused. The trauma of growing up in a cult lives alongside an inherited belief in miracles, transformation, and the power of shared stories. These contradictions taught me that truth is layered, unstable, and always in motion—shaped by our location, our histories, our bodies, and our relationships.
My work emerges from these tensions. I use words, images, scent, movement, and sound to create richly textured self-portraits, sculptures, films, photographs, paintings, and collaborative group exercises. Rooted in anarchy, mutual care, and imagination, my work is a practice of tending: to self, to community, to the land, and to the invisible. In all I do, I attempt to cultivate interdependence, agency, pleasure, and joy for oppressed people: My main medium is my life.
I often work with liquids—watercolors, thinned-out acrylics and oils, rain, tears, tinctures, bodily fluids. Like fugitives, water escapes control. I embrace its resistance, while also honing techniques to influence its path: tilting the canvas, adding alcohol, harnessing gravity, vibration. These gestures become a kind of choreography—negotiating between surrender and precision. Working in layers, I build surfaces that hold memory, shaped by chance, collaboration, and ritual.
I move between mediums and modes—painting, writing, organizing—to hold what doesn’t resolve. My practice is a space where grief, joy, resistance, and intimacy are entangled—touching, blurring, and remaking one another.
contact: solianahabte@gmail.com