artist statement

​​darien hunter golston (spelled lowercase, pronouns: he or d; b. 1994) is a transdisciplinary artist whose works - textiles, sculptures, assemblage, writing and curation - focus on Black agrarian traditions and queer domesticity. d plays with everyday materials - leaves, wood, soil, plant fibers, wax, seeds, fabrics - approaching them with ritualistic care and purposeful slowness. he studies the domestic crafts of his ancestors then applies those methods to exalt their ingenuity while honoring the sanctity of waste and scrap. This process driven approach yields dubious manifestations of home-making, speculative horticultural portraits, and dubious cultural artifacts. Each work attempts to tug at the tensions between interior and exterior, feminine and masculine, craft and fine art, belonging and isolation - to redress our orientation to kinship.

By inviting people to behold both the hand and the land in making, he hopes to spark renewed devotion to caretaking, universal reciprocity, and cultural preservation - a devotion that honors the embodied experience of living with/among the land devoid of extractive consumption. His creations evoke a call to cherish the objects that act as the connective tissue for family, home, community, and culture while widening our gaze to honor the soil, the plants, the ecosystem, and the land as our kin as well.