Artist Statement

Rachel Lin Weaver is an interdisciplinary media artist working in video, experimental documentary, sound, installation, and performance. Her projects explore personal and cultural memory, resilience in the face of adversity, landscapes and people in flux, and ecological systems. She is influenced by her upbringing in wilderness areas and rural communities in poverty, and finds many useful metaphors in the natural world. Weaver is most drawn to the murky areas where her personal perspective or deep memory confuses her ability to be scientifically objective. She negotiates this fertile and bewildering territory through collection (field recordings), and experimentation with composition and narrative that transforms understanding of a place or data. By combining deeply personal reflection with empirical observation, Weaver offers unusual and evocative meditative spaces where viewers contemplate the richness of ecology, and the overlap and collision of the personal and impersonal, the physical and metaphysical, the scientific and the ecstatic. Most recently, Weaver has worked as a facilitator of creative decolonizing workshops, and has co-created
experimental oral history and documentary projects with indigenous groups in Alaska and Central America.

• Rachel Lin Weaver, Virginia Tech University, USA