Buy A Coffee for Ori

Hello Hola Shalom Chibú Yswa I’m Ori or you can call my Chihisawi, born in California, raised in California and Nebraska, once an active duty soldier stationed in Missouri, lived in Texas and Ohio, and now make my home creating on unceded Lenape Land or so called NYC. My background is as an active death companion and trauma-informed grief coach for over 30 years and a photojournalist/documentary photographer for 15. I now am a full time artist and jeweler, following a medical negligence induced double simultaneous stroke and heart failure at the end of May of 2022 and subsequent heart surgery in the fall of 2023 that left me permanently disabled and unable to work outside of my home studio. I am a self-taught beader with a some lessons passed down by other Native beaders and elders. my work is both a repository and an amalgamation of my Indigenous Turtle Island/ Abya Yala and Jewish roots. I use traditional techniques and skill to create contemporary design. From cave paintings to pottery; traditional bead weaving to street art, these are the stories of mi familia, mi corazon. I began beading a couple years ago but it wasn’t until I became disabled that beading became a way of life, an adaptation to the temporary loss of the use of my dominant side. I was still beading right out of the hospital using my non-dominant hand. Unable to get early intervention, it became a self-led occupational therapy and a tranation for healing. I see beading, clay work, and metal craft as storytelling. In my work, I weave the stories of those who have passed on. These stories intermingle with chapters of my childhood, grief from displacement and loss, the poetry of my people before me, and the stardust of ancestral memory. Beading is communication, a language I share with others, quietly whispered in the wisk wusk of silver needle and nylon thread through glass beads; those orbs of earth fired medicine.

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