non-fiction

Greetings everyone. I have been invited to write a little for SoCiArts and I have decided to call my column "The Frame" because I wish to explore how creativity is constrained and framed by our political and economic institutions. I have made my living as a visual artist for about 20 years and I found ways of doing this without participating in traditional venues, competitions, grant writing and those sorts of things largely because I believe that our art industry does more to crush creativity than it does to broaden it. The general theme of "The Frame" is to encourage artists (which in itself is an elitist concept that we need to think about) to resist the old institutions of the art industry and to help build our own new institutions in their place.

At a public bath in Morocco, I watched a young adolescent bathe her grandmother. She picked up each limb, moved her breasts this way and that, and shifted her belly about to reach every crevice. She stood over her, squatted next to her, and sat alongside her as she put a fair amount of muscle into scrubbing her grandmother clean. The black soap made from olive oil oozed from the coarse cloth she used to slough off the dead skin and dirt. The grandmother lolled on the tiled floor in a reverie.