Hello there! It's Jocelyn Mathewes from my studio in Appalachia. And I’m here to talk about the recent Western medical discovery of the interstitium.
It is a beautiful discovery — a new place where we can look to explore so many things that remain mysterious about the human body, especially in the world of autoimmune disease. It's also yielded a beautiful metaphor — an embodiment of something that mediates between, like a cellular wall, but on a larger scale.
In this interview, Jessica Clark talks about the work of connecting others as the social version of the interstitium. The interstitium is a place where liminal figures in storytelling can wander.
This is something I often think about in my community practice through organizing regional meetups and my dining room gallery project. Connecting others—traveling the interstitium—is work. Those who live close to the edge of a community are mediators and guardians, passing between cultures and building bridges.
Connecting others takes sacrifice and vulnerability as well as wisdom and attention. Those who engage in “that invisible glue holding the relationships within a company together” are doing as something essential to the health of the whole.
This work cannot be done well without deeply knowing with whom you are connecting, and without being willing to hold back or rewrite your assumptions about the people you engage with.
So now, I can see these parts of my practice as interstitial work for the body of our community.
It's always a little dangerous to live inside a metaphor, since every metaphor is an incomplete representation of the world. However, I'm glad for it to be in our conceptual toolbox, and I look forward to what this will yield in Western medicine.
xo,
jocelyn
P.S. If you’re local, join me and the community on April 20th for the ArtStruck Festival, and an artist meetup at Create Appalachia on April 25th.
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