I’m an artist and writer working in several media depending on the ideas addressed. Paintings, drawings, videos, sound, conceptual, and written works have looked at how individuals and groups use language, imagery, and music to show the remarkable qualities of everyday experience. In the past, these works have concerned intentional communities and avant-garde groups that include Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstery, Surrealist writers, 1960s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, and musician milieus,
including Caribbean singers and UK punk bands. All of those examples feature in different parts of “Sonic Wilderness,” a book I published in 2022. One preoccupation driving that book was the proposal that unusual, often outsider, records form an obscure sonic resistance that exposes fault lines masked by conventional popular music and the ideologies that hold it in thrall.
Recent drawings, videos, and essays are part of a research project into colonial Caribbean botany and the African plant diaspora, the more than 30 fruits, vegetables, and grains transported to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade. As part of that project, I am writing on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite in relation to concepts of West Indian folk traditions and paradigms of sound and silence in the Caribbean histories.

Cheri Owen produces mixed media ceramic sculpture, functional wares, and prints. With a penchant for tactile mediums like ceramics and printmaking, she aspires to share her work with a world she can no longer see, as a means of touching people emotionally, through deep, piercing, poetic phrases, through the beauty of trees, birds, and the natural world, all of which she can still hear, deeply and fully. Owen is a blind artist and USAF veteran who works in Goleta, CA, where she lives with her wife and guide dog.

She is excited to be in a space for an extended period to be mindful and intimately aware of her creative practice, as well as to learn an unfamiliar environment through a touch-centered practice and to take in this new place and allow it to percolate into her work through bark, branches, trees, wind, deer, the warmth of the sun, grasses, the dew in the morning, the silence of the evening, the songs of the birds, and to inhale and listen to all of nature’s universe speaking to her. She is excited to be open to feel, taste, hear, and touch the region’s history.