There’s a certain sense of ritual to the month of April. We bow our heads to the rising sun cutting away at cold winter, kneel before raised beds and rolling acres, and plunge our hands into the opening earth. We are mere weeks, maybe days, from Indiana’s last frost sweeping through the state. It is planting time for Hoosier gardeners and farmers.

“Gardening is a Black cultural practice that I grew up with. Growing up with grandparents and great grandparents, having a garden in the backyard,” shares Shamira Wilson, whose newest exhibit Collective Breathing is on display in the main gallery of the Harrison Center. The collection is a thematic assortment of mixed media pieces she has been working on in various stages for about seven years, exploring “soil health as metaphor for collective breathing.” She continues, “I wanted to think about maps in that seed-starting idea. Literally, seeds started as I was trying to figure out how to grow a garden in my yard, which was a big part of the influence of this work.”

Breathing Pattern, Mixed Media on Oxidation Printed Quilting Fabric, 36"x36"

Collective Breathing represents Shamira’s transformation as an artist, as a whole person. The Tiny Houses, the smallest of the collection, compresses the ideas of what makes a home a home through precise lining and vibrant coloring on a 5” x 5” canvas. Breathing Patterns and Signs of Life, sets of several pieces, employ consistent patterns to illustrate how we hold and release breath in our bodies giving way to the ebbs and flows of existence. Land and Longing, a larger duo, brings the imagery of the Tiny Houses and Breathing Patterns together.

The largest piece of the collection, Breathwork, shows Shamira’s growing edge in technique and message. “The rust printing, for me, is my transformation. I'm going from this really tight grid to something that's more feminine in aesthetic, that's more fluid and organic. I'm not worrying so much about the tight shapes.” As her work expands, so does Shamira.

Breathwork, Mixed Media on Oxidation Printed Quilting Fabric, 36"x36"

This exhibit is just as much Shamira's story and lineage as it is documenting and amplifying the inherent urgency and calming feature of breath itself. “I'm carrying on the story from one piece to the next or from one show to the next. And a lot of that is because it's about me, but it's not,” she imparts. The gallery itself adds to this message, the space is large and stark white and Shamira’s work takes up the space it is meant to, lining the walls at eye level, pulling at the attention of visitors. Shamira’s curation unabashedly requires hyper-focus and presence, gently reflecting how we struggle to pause, slow down, and really breathe something in. She is folding this practice of deliberate stillness and movement into her artmaking and ways of moving through the world. “I found that when someone wants to rush something, it's not always to my benefit. And I have to slow them down and say, ‘No, I'm going to take my time,’ which is a hard thing to fight for.”

For many able-bodied people, breathing is a reflex, something our brains help us do without much thought. The ability to breathe is relatively easy to take for granted, that is, until the process is disrupted. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner uttered the phrase “I can’t breathe” moments before he succumbed to an illegal chokehold and died at the hands of former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo.

This week in Minneapolis, former MPD officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Floyd also told officers he could not breathe as Chauvin kneeled on his neck. Black people in and beyond the U.S. are grappling with the precarity of breath in light of violent policing and the pandemic. “Nationwide, Black people have died at 1.4 times the rate of white people,” according to the most recent data from The COVID Tracking Project. Shamira’s work embodies Ross Gay’s haunting poem for Eric Garner:

A Small Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

In that vein, Collective Breathing carefully holds the tension of the political moment and the desperate need to pause, the need to pay close attention to what lives beneath our feet.

Through mapping her own backyard garden, drawing on the wisdom of her family and childhood, Shamira cultivated the seedlings that would become Collective Breathing this spring. “I learned about Indigenous growing practices that are more thoughtful in the approach to soil health. There’s no tilling the ground.”

According to Don Donovan, district conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation

Service (NRCS), “Farmers plant into soils that have been degraded over the last 75 years largely due to extensive tillage and a monoculture of corn or soybeans.” Basically, Indiana soil health has been in decline for decades due to farming practices designed to increase production and profit.

“Our soil is in really bad shape,” says Shamira of her self-led research.

In response to these findings, Indiana NRCS launched “A Salute to Soil Health” in May 2016, an initiative to help farmers learn more about soil ecology and offer tools and practices to bolster soil health. Good soil gives us what we need to survive, from food to photosynthesis, but we have to take care of it in return.

Seed Starter, Mixed Media on Oxidation Printed Quilting Fabric, 36"x36"

Seed Starter and Seeded are a visual representation of the care soil needs to remain healthy, symbolizing the distinction between how we have been doing things and when we take the time to do things differently. The first is, “very structured, very gridded, is almost more masculine. That's the old system in my mind,” Shamira thoughtfully shares. “The new system is like the breath work, or the Seeded one, in which there's no real structure to the way that I put things down. Because there's no grid to follow underneath. So it's all up in the air. And I have to trust my intuition, just put something down and trust it’s in the right spot.” When we pause, slow down, and root our action in intention, worlds of possibility can come to fruition.

Collective Breathing bridges the gap between our very existence, inhale, exhale, and the dirt that makes every breath possible.