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GIFTING FROM LVDS

"It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange

that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people." - Lewis Hyde

 

TLDR: I ask that you purchase from my collections as gifts for someone in your community, and that you include a note

in which you write to me about what this person means to you.

 

One of my greatest hesitations in making my work and designs publicly accessible is how to build an economy around my artifacts of experiment,

softness, slowness and kindness that I can stand firmly beside. I have long been not only intellectually immersed in the world of gift economies, but personally living within it and by it for my entire life, with increasing intensity regarding its relation to my survival/thriving. When I read 'The Gift' by Barbara Browning, I felt my corner of an economics of emotional proximity to many generous people blown right out into the world. With an aversion to standardized means of acquiring income, having housing, nourishing myself—all of which I have achieved by non-normative means thanks in enormous part to my racial privilege—the capacity of gift giving and gift receiving as an economy in and of itself is absolutely essential to my way of life. My way of life requires leaning on others for the same nourishment, body, mind and soul, that I give out. Reciprocity, the cornerstone of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s approach to saving ourselves from a life void of the world, I largely understood as simply between humans until reading 'Braiding Sweetgrass'. I was simultaneously reading 'The Mushroom at the End of the World', which critically approaches how our entangled economies create more than transaction, and offers opportunity for economies beyond environmental ruin. Barbara Browning introduced me to David Graeber (anthropologist on gift economies), while Robin Wall Kimmerer introduced me to Lewis Hyde with the introductory quote to this page. She continues, 

 

“…the commodity economy has been here on turtle island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze,” (Kimmerer, p. 32).

 

I want to share my work with any who are intrigued by its aesthetic, its process, and/or its implications, from the most external to internal appreciation of what I hope it both symbolizes and enacts. But to build out a platform that reaches a wide enough public to sustain this work was immediately unraveling all of my intentions. I couldn’t shake the discomfort of looking at the ‘shop’ infrastructure of the website you’re reading this from, and building in price points, inventory count-downs, and more, all of which felt extraordinarily shallow and removed from the growth in the natural world that I both theoretically and physically built this collection from. 

 

Thus, my proposition is simple. If you wish to purchase an item from this collection, and from all future collections, I ask that you purchase it as a gift from someone else. It is my aim to better know the world in which these creations circulate by asking you to share with me who it is you are purchasing the work for, and why. When you make a purchase, you are invited to input a note in which you rave about who you envision receiving this gift (if that person is you, right on, I would love to see you write about yourself as a loved one would. While I cannot ask for proof that this is the case, and while purchasing things for oneself is of course important, I hope to bring the world-of-gifts-tinted-glasses to you world view regardless). If you are purchasing a custom piece that will need measurements, you are invited to contact me with your interest and I will reach out for those measurements to the gift-receiver on your behalf to establish a rapport with its wearer. 

 

Transaction, inventory, the commodity economy: these create unnecessary and devastating distance between me and you, between my creations and your community of care, and you from the community of care that grew the fibers for your gift.

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