We had the good fortune of connecting with Hunter Shackelford and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Hunter, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I’m from Virginia — the one the location everyone leaves out of the DMV! As a Southerner raised in a interlocational family, I believe my upbringing transformed my understanding of ancestral connective practices to home place and lineage. In my artistic practice, my ancestors speak through me and lead me to unearth stories and experiences of deep resilience and pain. Every time I create, I feel a deep pull towards the expansive and precarious Black historical archive and that includes a relationship to Virginia, my family, and the afterlife of slavery.

My political understanding and identity has been deeply shaped by the realities of my childhood living in Virginia discovering the antiblack realities of living near and around former/ current plantations. I know that who I am today is absolutely grounded in these experiences, and it also informs my choice to continue to learn and create my cultural work in Virginia today.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in text, moving image, painting, and textiles. My artistic practice involves research, archival excavation, and speculative fiction. My subject matter primarily focuses on Blackness, ugliness, suicide, and the contradictions of living dead.

My work is distinctive in that I am interrogating suicide and Blackness with the intention of deepening cultural awareness of the erasure of Black suicidal experiences. This work for me is deeply personal as a suicidal Black person who is constantly obscured from my own story, and denied my own voice for the sake of uplifting narratives of “everyone should want to live.”

I am still in my “early career” stage of my artistic practice, but I have been a cultural organizer since high school. I’ve constantly engaged anti-oppressive work through many avenues such as body autonomy campaigns, anti-sizism, and racial and gender justice. It wasn’t easy, especially because like many, I got into this work because it was always at the cost of my flesh. When your survival counts on the very advocacy you’re seeking, it becomes harder to find a creative avenue in what is consequentially life or death, resources or scarcity, etc.

A principle that means a lot to me is depth without drowning. I believe that living is hard and staying alive is even harder, and in the words of Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower, “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.” Because of that reality, I believe it’s important to go deep but without losing yourself or your raft. In a world of constant antiblack tragedy, oppression, and violence, I have to find ground even in the ocean. So in my artistic practice, I found ground even under water.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I want to shoutout all of my loved ones, especially my family and my bestie Christelle!

Website: https://hunterashleigh.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/huntythelion

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