Ingrid Sibley in Residency at Paper Machine

Ingrid Sibley was artist-in-residence at Paper Machine during the summer of 2020. During her residency, Ingrid designed a publication and also undertook the #100walksproject. You can see more of Ingrid’s time in residency here on her website. 

Two books were created around the concept of life scripting: an art book and a workbook. The artbook is 6X18, which includes a 4 inch perforated glossary/addendum section at the bottom, and is spiral bound. The workbook is a 180-page guided life scripting experienced, focused on connecting Black people to six tenets which have kept us connected from ourselves and our family across the Black diaspora. These books form the basis of a life scripting program, whose aim is to help people unlock their dreams and create new realities by writing into existence the future they would like to see. At this moment in our collective experience, opening the path to dreaming and scripting seemed like an important resource to investigate and expose from one person’s perspective.

As an integrated artist and trained art director, my current focus is using advertising techniques to design new sociocultural realities. As a linguist and environmentalist, the project Black Box explores how the following six tenets may be used to reconnect a disconnected (Black) people: language, water, land, lineage, culture and spirituality. This project looks at four major colonizing languages (English, French, Dutch and Spanish) and how global cities affected by them have both been morphed by the weight of globalization, and hold on to Africanisms inherent to the people that have given flavor to the 16 port cities worldwide across the United States, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. This project is linked to a life’s purpose of healing endangered people by healing endangered spaces. While the surface goal is to create a global Black conversation, the underlying intent is to restore a sense of connection and autonomy to a historically disparate people. Having taken stock of my skills and interests, using them to aid in the movement toward individual and collective liberation seemed like the most honorable thing I could do.

-Ingrid Sibley