Do you know that feeling when you are spontaneously attracted to something or someone, without being able to put a finger on to the reason why? An inexplicable, intense pull towards something with no clear rational basis?

This happened to me last week when I chanced onto the work of Sydney Cain, a San Francisco based, young emerging artist, who has shown work at Betti Ono Gallery, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, SOMArts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the African American Arts and Culture Complex. I only saw it on the web, so wish I could have stood in front of the real thing.

Cain’s work is deeply spiritual – I am not. Her work is steeped in the myth and history of her people of African descent. I am a White woman with no connection to that continent other than a longing to travel there again. Her focus is on multiple aspects of genealogy and her ancestors in the Jim Crow South. As a German, I’d rather not engage in genealogy for fear of what one might find.

Her images touch something in my heart and my brain, nonetheless. The large figures, often located behind an obstruction, like a wire or a fence (typical of the wrought-iron fences surrounding the graves found in Southern cemeteries,) seem to exist in some liminal space. They are not quite defined persons, but also not simply ghosts. They seem to be going about their business, rather than waiting to be called back from the past, yet they are not quite present.

They remind me of some of Käthe Kollwitz’s work in her print cycles around the Peasants Wars, her political focus on the evil of oppression, and paean to the masses demanding justice. Her preoccupation with death across history was matched by her connection to populations who suffered, bringing the dead back to life, ignoring existing class and cultural divides or historical chasms.

A canny ability to used smudged imagery to bring something else into sharpened focus.

Cain moves dust of graphite, chalk and cobalt with her hands across the paper to reveal these ancestral representations. The choice of these media is deliberate:

“Graphite, as the element carbon, represents the possibilities of forming into new allotropes. Chalk and carbon based material, commonly formed from the shells of ancient deep marine organisms acts as a medium of spiral time theories.”

These media are somewhat ephemeral (compared to an oil painting,) which confronts us, in her words, with the ideas of impermanence and transformation, on the bedrock of her belief that the ancestors can be reborn as narrators in our own reality.

Maybe that was the pull of the work, linking to the preoccupation of many of us right now with impermanence and transformation given our plague-riddled world – virus and racism alike. Although I should phrase that more carefully: I really have shifted from thinking about impermanence to thinking about transformation instead.

Impermanence for me links to a state of loss, often grieved, something that existed in the past and is now gone. Transformation, on the other hand, is not a state but a process, one that is oriented toward the new, the future. We might not control the transition or even know what that future looks like, but it is movement, like life itself, rather than stasis shrouded in nostalgia (or for some, dread.) That framing – a forward movement – feels, if not empowering, at least like a guide accompanying us into the unknown. It is comparable to the drinking gourd songs of Cain’s ancestor, purportedly leading them, with the help of the Big Dipper, from bondage into new worlds.

ONWARDS.

Follow the drinkin’ gourd
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
For the old man is comin’ just to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinkin’ gourd

Here is an interview with the artist.

Images of Cain’s works are from her website. Mine are from steelyards, the closest match I could find to her gorgeous series Spaces.

Music follows to the Drinking Gourd, in multiple versions, with different artists.