UNMADE: A SPECULATIVE RETROSPECTIVE

I turn 50 this year. I began my life as a prolific artist in theater, dance, and writing. By nine years old, I was already a semi-professional performing artist, and by twelve, I did my first international tour. But somewhere amidst the journey of becoming a mother of three, my own creative life quietly faded. I am profoundly grateful to be a mother. I would do it all over again for the honor of raising three inspiring souls. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, I still grieve my deferred creativity.

I kept making things, but through other people's visions. I built a career as an arts programmer, cultural strategist, and researcher. I collaborated. I supported. I championed. All of it was meaningful, but none of it was born entirely of me.

Throughout that time, however, I kept emailing myself ideas with the subject line: Art to Make. The first one was sent in 2002. In 2022, I went back through twenty years of those emails and counted 155 unmade projects. Some are small. Some are enormous. Some are strange. Some are trite. And some are irrelevant and some feel more relevant than ever.

UNMADE: A SPECULATIVE RETROSPECTIVE is a series of sketches showcasing what has been waiting in my inbox to be made for decades. Most of these ideas will never become more than a sketch, but they remain valid artworks of my lifelong curiosity, creativity and imagination. They are beautiful, they are meaningful, and they deserve to be expressed, simply because they want to be.

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Everything in the UNMADE project is a work in progress, shared here in public. You may find something one day and find it gone the next, replaced by some evolution, distraction or reconsideration of the idea.

PROJECTS TO MAKE

Projects on my list to make are in raw form.

All projects, writing, and creative materials on this site are © Kamal Sinclair and may not be reproduced without permission.