Hypeart Visits: For Diana Sinclair, the Medium Is the Message

“I didn’t expect all of this to open up, but I started to see it spiral outwards.”

Within the exhibition, you grapple with a wide range of eras and ideas. What are some of the themes explored in the pieces?

The square pieces are about the physical and spiritual element of the deaths of people who passed away during the Middle Passage. This whole body of work was inspired by residence time, which is the amount of time it takes for the ocean to fully consume something. For bodies, that takes about 260 million years.

For me, there’s a question of whether death by water is different from a burial. I’m thinking about the DNA of people who were thrown, and the choices made by those who took fate into their own hands and jumped. It brings me back to the sense of faith that people had in death — that release over the life of enslavement they were being delivered to.

The cyanotypes revolve around the center sculpture made out of pool tiles. How does modern day swimming culture and aquatic spaces play into this?

You can watch America evolve through a pool space. I became fascinated by social boundaries and how people were forced to face them in swimming pools. In other spaces, we were moving towards a progressive mindset, yet there was still a lot of tension in these spaces and they led to a lot of suffering and death.

The work started with researching the segregation of pools because of my relationship with water as a swimmer. It made me feel extremely othered and created permanent damage to my body. I watch my brother swim as a way to open doors for himself, in spite of his own experiences. I had to sit with the things that I had gone through and ask why they happened. I didn’t expect all of this to open up, but I started to see it spiral outwards: water is necessary to life, so how are we holding trauma on mental, physical and spiritual planes?

The title came to me as I was thinking about time. The works are on fabric, but I also wanted to consider how threads weave and layer on top of each other. I believe that the future can also affect the past, it’s not always linear. It’s a question of how we got here and what happened after we arrived.

As an artist who works at the intersection of more than a few themes and ideas, do you have any advice for how to keep your thoughts organized?

Mind maps. It’s valuable to put everything you’re thinking on one page — associative writing to dig into the patterns and relationships between the core theme and other ideas on your mind or sitting on your spirit.

“This is like my championship season.”

How does spirituality figure into your practice?

It’s the foundation for everything. Going through those cycles of release and frustration was a spiritual practice. Moving through the highs and lows, and alchemizing the lows into progress.

In every area of life, the chaos of destruction and evolution will always spiral back around. The works serve as markers of time through these stages, and I have to make sure that that connection and conversation is always at their core.

Beyond the conceptual, would you say your experience as an athlete shaped the more literal approach to your practice?

My relationship to sports impacted how I think about my practice and my studio time. This is like my championship season, I have to be very present with the pieces I’ve been working toward all season.

After this, I should take a little break, but then I have to get back into building up my artistic stamina. I’ll go through an exploratory phase and accept the new frustrations that come with. I’ll figure out how to apply those lessons from last season, and hopefully it’ll be a smoother process because I’ll allow myself more grace.