This piece came out of a new event series called “Are.na Walkthroughs” in which we ask people to take us through a particular channel, the blocks and ideas held within, and the ways those ideas may have evolved as the channel has grown and accumulated. Our second one was on April 23 over Zoom, and it featured Dodi King, Rohan Chaurasia, Cedric Payne, and Francis Tseng. Here, Dodi shares some of what she talked about while walking us through her channel “theoretical practice.”

My channel “theoretical practice” is an intimate dream space where my ideas incubate and take shape, composed of visual references and texts that I began gathering with the intention of building a foundation of research for my art practice. It serves as a guide for explorations in medium, materiality, color, composition, and subjects related to the natural world and the occult. My development of the channel is intuitive and loose, so it can be considered a stream of consciousness where similar concepts are expressed in a multitude of forms. Since leaving art school at the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been devoting lots of energy toward self-directed study. Some of the blocks are like bookmarks for lines of research that I want to delve more deeply into.