Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary, Afro-Indigenous (Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka, Jamaican, settler) artist who was born and raised in T’karonto, Dish with One Spoon Treaty territory, and recently relocated to Prince Edward County. The Gazette interviewed Kaya Joan over email.

What brought you to the County? How has being here inflected your practice?

My partner and I moved to the County in December of 2022. We had connections through my mom and her partner, who had a farming internship at Blue Wheelbarrow Farm the previous summer. They decided to move here, and met some folks who were moving out of their place. It had a backyard and cheaper rent then we were paying in Toronto. My partner, Neil Maguire, and I took a trip here in October 2022. Shortly after, we decided to pack up our apartment and move as well. 

We had been thinking of moving out of the city for a little while already, as it was getting more and more difficult to afford, and we both wanted to strengthen our farming/gardening skills. It was nice to know we would have family close by. The folks whose place we moved into had worked at Blue Wheelbarrow and at Vicki’s Veggies, so we got connected with good people quite quickly. 

In moving here, my practice has shifted, as I am mostly working out of our apartment, which is a change from the small studio space I had in Toronto. Neil is also an artist, though, and we  are sharing a studio at Base 31 with Vanessa B. Rieger, so I am excited to see what happens in that space.

Do you have a “day job?” Or are you a full-time artist, and if so, what does that mean?

At the moment, I make my living from commission/contract-based work, and teaching, which I have been doing for the past three years. This work includes murals, illustrations, commissions for galleries and artist-run centers, grants, residencies, art fairs, workshops and some other odds and ends. This past summer I worked part-time at Vicki’s Veggies and learned a lot from her and the other folks working there. It was awesome working outside and learning valuable farming skills. 

I am doing a residency with Media Arts Committee, working on a project called “Boombox of the Empire Eater,” an audio piece exploring how sound can operate in moments of resistance, across time and space. I am also working on a project through an Ontario Arts Council grant, exploring the archives of the County. I learned from a fellow in Picton this summer that there is history of the Underground Railroad in Wellington. I am very interested in learning more about that.

You made a short film inspired by a 17th-century piece of crewel-work fabric, and narrated by “the voice of Indigo, reflecting on its life cycles.” What spurs the attention to life cycles in your work?

Cycles are everywhere, from the macro-celestial to the micro atomic levels, and they are all intricately woven together to create life. I think about the cycles in the natural world a lot in my work, such as the life of a plant from seed, to root, to decomposition into the mycelium network and humus. Cycles make me think of change, and so of a quote I am constantly referring to by the writer Octavia E. Butler in her novel Parable of the Sower (a book I recommend to everyone). She writes, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” This notion of change is important to me, in thinking about all things being in relationship to one another, and therefore affecting each other, a lifeway I engage in my work on many levels. 

Are there histories, or futurities, on which you focus?

Something I explore in my work is non-linear temporality, or thinking about time outside of “beginning, middle, end,” what Diné anarchist Klee Benally calls “authoritarian temporality.” In my practice, everything is rooted in worldbuilding and storytelling. I think about storytelling as a technology of time-travel, in which history is a lived present rather than a distant past. This work is rooted in place. I am interested in exploring archives of place embedded in land, as well as in other mediums. 

What was it like to work on the “You Belong Here” Mural Program in the County? 

That program was an excellent introduction into the work that County Arts does with the community. I appreciated connecting with the other artist facilitators, Ambivalently Yours, Kat Burns, Tim Snyder, project co-ordinator Stacey Sproule, and youth from the ROC. It was awesome learning about the County from the perspective of young people here, talking about their visions for the future, and witnessing their working together to create such powerful murals to reflect those visions. The murals are now at the ROC. 

Tell us a bit about the work on the cover of this week’s issue, “They Carry the Universe.” 

This is a painting I worked on for about two months at the end of 2023. While painting this work, I was (and still am) witnessing the genocide unfold in Gaza. In response, art institutions silenced, and continue to silence, Palestinian voices, and allies who voice their solidarity. I witnessed Wanda Nanibush, the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the AGO, be silently fired for her solidarity work with Palestine, and the ROM remove Palestinian-American artist Sr7aneh’s work from an exhibition. Palestine will be free in this lifetime, and this painting responds to those who are organizing, refusing silence and opening portals beyond the deathscape of imperialism and settler colonialism.

To view more of Kaya’s work, visit kayajoan.com, and on instagram, @kayajoan.