Karin Spitfire "Residue"

18" x 24" signed poster

My best work takes the commonplace, infuses it with a shift in perspective to invoke something that includes a multifaceted shock of recognition.Some combination of instinct and experience chooses the medium that matches my need for expression. 

All my art springs from this need and synthesizes three lifelong disciplines of study and activism. The individual and collective movements for liberation and healing from racist capitalist patriarchal violence in its myriad manifestations, in-depth exploration of the body/mind, and the wild explosive landscape of dream inform my work in concert with each other.

Dance and performance art, mixing movement and words, dominated my focus from 1975–2000. Performance works included How a Collective Works or Doesn’tas the Case Maybe;Incest: It's all Relative; Corpus Callosum; Wild Card Anatomy; and Sports and Art, as well as collaborations with Barbaria Maria and Larraine Brown as Dovetail Performing Arts, and ad hoc shows with Anna Dembska, Andrea Goodman, Venita Robertson, and Lee Saunders (Karin Spitfire and Her friends Hold Forthand The Three Ring Circus Opera). 

Sometimes my form is the large cultural/political event, such as the Anti-Columbus Day Parade in 1992 or the Sardine Extravaganza in 2010.

Poetry is now my primary form including the full-length collection Standing with Trees, and the chapbook Wild Caught; and being the 2019 winner of Joe Gouveia Outermost Contest, Marge Piercy Judge; along with publication in many printed and online journals and collections. But poetry is fickle; it only arises as a gift, when push comes to shove, when the gut turmoil demands language, when the air shifts. It does not arise on demand, even with practice.

So my secondary medium entails the Artist Book, a few of which have been exhibited around the state and across the country: Habeus Corpus, A Most Firmamentous Day, No Accounting for Accounting, The Story of O2, and Press ON—A Rumination on the Fifth Chakra: the Voice. Artist Books allow me to utilize everything—movement; words; and image-making from painting, drawing, printmaking, letterpress printing—while the poems germinate like seeds under the snow. 

Press ON—A Rumination on the Fifth Chakra: the Voicecombines text, visuals and sculptural metaphor to bring the viewer through an experience of moving from subjugation to release by way of perseverance and expression. This work derives from the historical context of women “breaking silence” about all forms of violence against women and the necessity of finding voice and being heard for all marginalized peoples.

Press ONis the first of seven large sculptural books representing the seven chakras or the seven sacred sites, each inspired by a dream. The others are currently in process. 

Residue by Karin Spitfire

Essential tremor is commonly described as an action tremor

I shake
my left hand mostly,
it makes some people nervous, sometime I am nervous sometimes I’m not,
sometimes my whole body shakes

There is not one myth in the western world of daughter killing father.

These nerves to the left hand, This group of muscles
can’t completely resolve
the simultaneous impulses

to never reach out to him again or cut his jugular

now he’s dead of his own accord

I shake
the death rattle and sing freedom