INSIDE THESE WALLS : A FRAGMENT OF LIFE
Performance Exhibition April 12th, 6-8pm
“This exhibition attempts to explore an expansive historical, geographical, socio-political, religious, and aesthetic range in performance, craft, and written material. By design, it is far too much content to parse apart or contend within a two hour window. The fragment one is able to glean from their experience here is going to be entirely idiosyncratic to that audience member, by and large because there is no way to take in every room in its fullness. Through discordant technologies and intersecting themes of concern, I am presenting an example of the vast array of large-scale and personal issues that can unravel under one roof. Nothing in this home is being presented as concretely finished. I don’t believe that these conversations are ever able to be “finished.” It is all to be viewed as something forever emerging, unfolding, and gaining resonance through accumulation- too many photographs, too many books with an ever growing array of notes, too many performances to watch. The concerns shared here are environmental, emotional, ecological; it is ever-lasting, this echo of personal development and politics. Each floor and room explores a different dimension of these concerns, linking the spaces through visuals which harken back to the aesthetics (and politics) of the Arts and Crafts movement. Various forms of media are deployed throughout the space in order to gesture broadly, while the interspersal of my personal narrative hopes to bring specificity.
This exhibition is autotheoretical, and autofictional, but it is also a strong attempt to hone in on something global. It is my personal experience and developing Self that acts as an interface for that which goes beyond my corporeal, spiritual, digital, and historic limits.
The first floor negotiates with the politics of the dinner table, family, and pilgrimage. Those at the dinner party are reciting internalized sentiments about hunger and queer desire from ceramic surfaces. Some phrases are lifted directly out of my lesbian romance novel; featured upstairs. The living room, activated sonically by the piano playing ‘Come & Find the Quiet Center,’ is overwhelmed with free-floating documentation and reflections from my 2022 and 2023 pilgrimages to Denmark and England, and my 2023 pilgrimage to Spain. Denmark; where my family and Søren Kierkegaard hail from. England; the country that my wife and I are moving to in 2025 in order to fulfill deep-seated desires for the future. Spain; where I observed the display of a long, proud history of textiles and social performance.
The second floor explores the erotic, fiction, and the power of personal narrative. In one room, the audience is invited to dig through a box of explicit sexual content created during a time where I was desperately trying to redefine my own erotic image, especially as a queer woman who is chronically ill and forever pulling myself out of the physical damage endured from a lifetime of anorectic behavior. The other room features a printed copy of the lesbian romance novel that I publish online for young queer women. This novel was being released in tandem with the images in that box. Writing the novel began on my 2022 pilgrimage to London; where I vowed to begin again.
The attic proposes broader politics, especially regarding my Methodist faith and queer sexuality, but further: a refusal to simply decorate. I lean into how the autotheoretical operates beyond the misogynistic, racist, limited notion that to theorize on oneself is simply “navel-gazing.” While I have used autotheory throughout the rest of the exhibition as a device to illuminate something personal in my unwell, queer body, I hope to show how autotheory is also a revolutionary tool for deconstructing colonialist propaganda and structures. This space attempts to heavily echo the socialist activist and godfather of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, and his equally formidable daughter, May Morris. As a craftswoman, my job is to turn my gaze upon labor practices, to consider what it means to generate arts, craft, and narrative under capitalism, and to reject automation for the sake of automation. Akin to the inclusion of my own novel on the second floor, I am including a collection of Morris’ socialist imaginative landscape; novels and poetry tagged for the audience to peruse at their leisure. I additionally provide some of my own writing, durational performance that negotiates correspondence and address, and published content surrounding reflections on the intersecting crises the world faces. The attic tackles concerns and conversations surrounding the climate disaster / violence under capitalism, the brutal devastation of indigenous folks such as the Palestinian people, and the attempts at policing bodies through anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation in the United States.
This exhibition has been a labor of great love. I am beyond blessed to be the recipient of so much assistance. It is my sincere prayer that whatever fragment of information you take from here is something which both troubles and uplifts you. It is my prayer that you hold it as something that is either, and or, and rest. That it allows you to dig into that which has left an indelible mark for you.
For me, the scope of experiences, resources, writing, and performances presented here are to illuminate something which I have come to hold as undeniable when it comes to how I live, how I move through the world, how I experience God, how I observe the terrain of my politics and deeply private heartache:
There is no moving on; I carry it all with me.”
Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter is an American artist working in performance and contemporary craft. Through the combination of antiques and handmade objects, CMM generates memoir and autotheory-based work that aims to invoke apparitions; that which cannot be recovered or fully known. By evoking nostalgia and solastalgia, her cyclical, symmetrical, and hyper-repetitive performative projects demand the analysis of our ties to place, ancestry, and future as we brace for the full impact of our climate crisis. She holds an MFA in 4D from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BFA in performance art and BA in art history from University of Northern Iowa.
Her work has been shown throughout the Midwest; at 2022’s Fringe Arts Bath festival in Bath, England; at 2021’s Miami Art Week as a part of the PERFORMANCE IS ALIVE / Satellite Show that runs concurrent with Art Basel Miami; at Louisiana State University for the 2019 Queeramics Symposium; in Ceramics Monthly; Emergency Index V. 8 and V. 9; and Aesthetica Magazine.