Meet Redwood Ashley Hill | multi-hyphenate/creative.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Redwood Ashley Hill and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Redwood Ashley, what inspires you?
Life. Land. The indigenous wisdom of reciprocity, and how to *become* indigenous despite physical provenance. We, as an artist, are inspired by the lineages of ocean mammals and pollinators, especially birds to remember our prehuman forms and the stories therein and offer those memories to our imagination.

In human lineage, we are inspired by the works of so-called outliers that have found a way to wrestle the reins and bend the world towards them after learning how to transform isolation into collectivity. With specificity the works of Baldwin, Cesaire, Butler, Delaney, Hartman, Daley-Ward, Lorde & Morrison, all writers whose words have informed the manifold modalities of what “work” is and can be for us.

**(“We” in this usage is an attempt to recognise the plurality of our embodied selves.)

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
A quote that comes back to us over and over when thinking about the work is from Vincent Van Gogh, another of the neurodiverse outliers whose work we admire and who was ridiculed and relatively unheld in his lifetime; “But I always think to know god, is to love to do many things.”

Our work across disciplines is all efforting towards liberatory practice. Like smaller plant life that reaches for sunlight, we are constantly learning anew how to extend ourselves in a modeling of sovereignty, self-determination and accountability. So much about our work is about the loving embracing of multiple interests. Our visual work is an autodidactic and meandering process of discovery and transmission, with representational subjects often releasing or revealing themselves into and out contrived flat planes, gaining fullness demonstratively. It is work that is informed by autodidacts that came before us and left instructions for how to piece together shareable lifestyles. Our primary interest in any interative forms of “success” are with the collective interest of the beloved community in our heart.

It is an exceptional gift to arrive to a part of the process that resists internalisations and stigmas about neurodiversity & identity politics and in their stead, continues to install a powerful gratitude for a curiosity that is most often sated by multiple engagements; visually, literarily, and culinarily (with reclamation of food pathways as the core of our cooking practise). That lesson has been hard learnt through the socialised and abusive cycles of self-loathing, isolationism, and middle-class values, promoted by the economic systems of our time, opting instead for sustainable techniques of self-loving as a verb, and playful regard for our multiple interests. This is never an easy option, to question how we learned to love ourselves, others, and our work, and convert that to a radical application of how we “get to work”. It is a daily ritual to remind ourselves of our value outside of racial capitalism, and it is a steady resolve to model curiosity and artistic practise as a wormhole and as its own activism.

The world ought to know that creative production out of the imaginations of folx whose bodies, minds, and locations are consistently under attack, is a lifetime of acts of resistance. Some folx do not get to choose activism. They are it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
In the Bay Area, or perhaps California at large, I would say to patronage any businesses that are stewarded by folx whose intersectional identities make them likely candidates for displacement, and who would otherwise be thriving if much of their energies were not devoted to merely surviving:

Wahpehpahs Kitchen in the Fruitvale district of Oakland
Reems, also in the Fruitvale district of Oakland
Picaro in the Mission, incredible art & tapas to behold
The popups & supperclubs of the Pleasure Principle, also coming out of the Fruitvale district but with locations all over the bay.

Free nights at the SF MoMA, stay inspired, and take care of your budget.

the Musuem of the African Diaspora (MoAD) just around the corner from SF MoMA

Would definitely suggest to them the wave crashing caves at Lands’ End Park in SF, those rocks also hold the memory of the land before its contemporary manifestation.

Having recently relocated from the Bay Area (we didn’t quite surmise how to make enough to outlast the tech revival 3.0) to the southeast, North Carolina, I am learning and retracing the paths of ancestors to behold unceded and preserved lands like;
Eno River & “William Umstead” Park.

With some context provided on land acquisition, I would absolutely suggest the Duke Gardens, it is so beautiful there.

The Salt Box, james beard nominated fish fry
Capital Seafood, old school fish fry
Ziweli’s, unparalleled Zimbabwean food (a gem!)

& The Earthseed collective to engage communal imagining on the return of indigenous lands and a renewal of our relationships to it, with our hands on and in it.

For drinks in the Bay,
anywhere near any water, with folx you count on as family, usually with a well-bodied pet nat or a pinot gris, even on cold days.

The Moongate Lounge at Mr. Jiu’s in San Francisco

Low Bar in Oakland

For drinks in the South:

the city of New Orleans

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The book “Bone” by Yrsa Daley-Ward, shifted our consciousness on what writing from within a political identity and from without the terminology of political discourse was revolutionary for us and our creative practises. Such an act of daring to write intimately and sensually instead, making and telling stories, with blackness and queerness as the nucleus with a reverence for the necessary beauty of language, This book, to us, belongs in the lineage of the literature of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, two writers whose unflinching critiques of misanthropic structures, offered to our own work the tools of managing discursive work into communicable ideas and testimony.

Instagram: @redwood_hill

Other: Celieandsqueak.com some of our paintings can be found in the “dry goods” section. and the latest edition of Cooking Whole30, was an editing project born out of the uprisings of 2020. Our edits helped to achieve a more inclusive and accountable edition of what was at the outset, kind of just another fad cookbook oriented towards the affluent.

Image Credits
All photos submitted are the copyright and conceptual property of the artist, Redwood Ashley Hill, all rights reserved 2023.