Bridgette Hickey is an artist with a care-based practice that centers Black autistic psychic landscapes, with a methodology of using what they have on hand, and deep listening. Symbology of an Echo is an invitation to engage with sensing, language, and information exchange. In this performance, Hickey activates their installation for Conductions: Black Imaginings II with poetry to tap into ancestral modes and techniques, inviting the audience to be in devotion to matriarchal archives.
Bridgette comes from blue mud earth tenders, people who prayed fiercely, with written words, hands on bodies, with water and song, in dance and ecstatic expression. Her practice includes growing plants, archiving through prose, immersive installations, earth ceremony, quilting as a form of prayer, botanical dyeing, and facilitating story and grief circles in community. Bridgette’s practice is how she listens back to time, her body, and the many others here with her. Bridgette’s work explores fragmentation as map making. She is influenced by her Black, Irish, and Nipmuc ancestral technologies, and a devotion to orienting her attention towards lifeways that protect life belonging by intimately honoring the dead and fragmented. Currently Bridgette is working on the second iteration of Beloved Fragments, now Seed to Quilt a project centered in love and care work between her and Black queers/autists/mad women/dreamers/artists/elders.
