“The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski

I’m an interdisciplinary and community artist, mapping a new geography of belonging through play. My work is driven by curiosity about the myriad ways we each experience the world, rooted in the neurodiversity paradigm that there is no one right way to be.

Through a multi-layered, participatory research process, and a range of forms including photography, oral history, video, and interactive installations—I invite people to question the maps we inherit that tell us how we should live or feel. I’m interested in what happens when we risk being vulnerable. What can we create if we stop hiding, start playing, and chart the terrain of who we authentically are?

Whether grappling with prescribed guides about parenthood, grief, or sex, I transform and abstract everyday objects, texts, and stories to discover new perspectives of the changing landscapes of our lives. Over many years, I’ve been growing an atlas of projects that reflect the magnificent variety and messy complexities of being human.

With other disoriented new mothers, I repurposed guilt-inducing parenting manuals into found poetry and paper baby clothing. After my friend’s young son died, I surveyed dozens of lived topographies of loss, creating abstract photographic landscapes that reflect a wider range of travel through grief than many people know. Frustrated by the shrinking boundaries of childhood play, I invited kids to build a playground out of wood, rope, and fabric photographs of their parents’ outdoor play memories. I made an erotic short film with a thermal camera, capturing heat instead of light, to reveal new ways of seeing pleasure and play.

Mapping our lives by taking the familiar and making it strange helps us see the world—and ourselves—differently, creating space for new questions, unexpected conversations, and community. There is beauty in being seen: in making art together that reveals and celebrates the contours of each of our unique territories, so we can notice what emerges as we feel our way toward a shared aliveness.

If you feel the same way, join my community by adding yourself to my mailing list below. I send out occasional news about my evolving practice and opportunities to participate in projects. I look forward to meeting you.

xo,

Bio:

Mindy Stricke is an interdisciplinary and community artist and researcher mapping our lives through play. Her work has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been exhibited and screened around the world. She has been featured in CBC Arts, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Japan’s Voce Magazine, Toronto Star, Modern Loss, What’s Your Grief, and the Smithsonian Institute of Photography book and exhibit, “Click! Photography Changes Everything.” A transplanted New Yorker now living in Canada, she is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.