Interview
Duncan Richards
Duncan Richards (she/they) is her father’s son and her mother’s daughter. An interdisciplinary artist and spiritsmith, blurring the boundary between the material and the mystical. Through sculptural assemblage, digital collage, and mediumship, she conjures vivid imagery that explores the realms between the seen and unseen. Her visually meditative work invites viewers into realms where esoteric traditions and digital technologies intertwine. Inspired by the legacies of Trans/Queer movements and traditional folk magic, her practice intertwines contemporary art with primordial praxis. Across all her projects, she crafts a world where art is not just an object but an interaction—where spirit and matter speak through one another in a continuous, evolving dialogue. Duncan’s work has been featured in galleries across New York and in collaborations with the Kolaj Institute of New Orleans and the National Folklore Collection at the University of Dublin.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“I’m an interdisciplinary artist, folk practitioner, and spiritsmith based in New York. I originally got my start sporadically working on short films, commercials, and TV work; basically, doing any job on set I could get my hands on. I loved working with tons of people and seeing how you could essentially take a bunch of strangers, put them together in a studio, and by the end of the day, have something that would eventually become a snapshot of the collective creative process. But during this time, I also realized I needed something creative of my own, and that I could do with limited resources. So, I naturally turned toward what I did have, which was my laptop, PowerPoint, and a rudimentary understanding of how to edit photos, which became the foundation for most of my early work. Over the course of the next several years, I made digital collages whenever I could, inspired by spiritual and surrealist movements of the 1920s, and combining my own lived experience as a medium to explore the inner esoteric landscapes I was working through. Eventually, I worked up enough courage to start submitting my work to open calls, and the rest is history.”
What does your work aim to say? Does it comment on any current social or political issues?
“Since the beginning, my art has always been inspired by my spiritual ties and experiences. For the majority of my life, I’ve been a practising spirit medium and folk practitioner, having had the great pleasure to learn from many great teachers and people within lineages of Trolldom (Scandinavian folk magic), Traditional European craft, Southern American hoodoo/conjure, and some unnamed traditions. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I began to embrace more publicly how my work with spirits as a significant and defining aspect of my artistic praxis. To be able to come together with something that is quite literally unknowable and invisible by creating something this is visible, I think, is incredibly beautiful. In hindsight, I now understand that I started making art as a way to navigate and collaborate through the unknowable. To be fair, this practice of creating art with or inspired by spirits is far from new within the global artistic canon - whether it’s the incredible poetic traditions of the irish and the ‘good neighbors’ or the beautiful nkisi carvings from the Kongalese peoples - it’s just taking the Modern Western world a good bit to wake up to what has always been a vibrant and living artistic tradition. I think that most people like to imagine the artist as the sole creative genius, locked away in a tower somewhere as a static producer of work. Personally, I was raised on the animist perspective that we live in an inspirited world, and we cannot exist within a vacuum because there is creation happening all around us, whether that be something quite literal or simply the spirit of the act of creation itself. I think that we are rarely ever alone in the process of creation, even if we ourselves at times feel quite lonely. I love making things with and inspired by spirits in the same way I love collaborating with other people; it’s more fun to have a few other geniuses in the tower.”
Do you plan your work in advance, or is it improvisation?
“It's a blend. The initial process of creating something like a collage is often automatic, as you can produce only a distinct range of outcomes with the collection of images that you have. But when I physically make something, it depends on what it is. To give a window into the spirit smithing process, if I'm talking to something I don't have a prior relationship with, it usually involves a lot of research into who or what I'm interested in working with. Sometimes I'll incorporate dreamwork or lucid states where I'll essentially ‘dream while awake.’ Most of the work involves finding a neutral resting state, allowing a series of images and bodily sensations to come in from whoever I'm speaking with. I'm then able to process and synthesize these things into a concrete visual through drawing or writing. I have a rotating court of spirits that I work most familiarly with, and who are essentially my unseen collaborators. From the outside, it's not anything too terribly different from any other artist, except the acknowledgment of the other presences, that and maybe one or two more candles than the average bird.”
Are there any art world trends are you following?
“I’m especially drawn to artists and curators who are collapsing the boundaries between ritual and expressions of resistance. I think that in an era where things feel somehow too easily digestible and also simultaneously incredibly overwhelming, there is a lot of meat to be had in the mess of it all. I love extremely passionate people, no matter what they’re doing, but especially those who have found this interesting intersection between channeling their love for something and balancing it against the rage that they may be experiencing in their daily life. Being able to synthesize the rage we feel as people into a force that can be used to connect is incredibly admirable to me. I love people who turn the energy of ‘I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired’ into something new. In particular, I also love the work of my former mentor, Gavilán Rayna Russom, and her work with Voluminous Arts, which is an experimental collective of Trans artists creating through music and sound. Even just knowing that there is a collective of Trans artists out there making space for one another automatically changes the way that others view the limits of what they believe they can achieve and do. I’m also a big fan of the feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost, named after famed spiritworker and artist Hilma af Klint, who combined ritual work with large-scale abstract paintings. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the incredible work of J.M. Hamade, Maeg Keene, and Sasha Ravitch as some of the pillars of the artistic astrological community. All of their work has inspired me both professionally and personally to create in the ways that I do with spirits.”
What process, materials and techniques do you use to create your artwork?
“My practice in its entirety spans collage, sculpture, installation, and writing. I’m perhaps the most organized junk rat you’ll ever meet because I love to make things, but I hate clutter. But, in the end, sometimes the mess wins because I’m at a space now where, for years, I was only able to create with what I could do on my laptop. But now I will essentially learn whatever medium I can to best express whatever feeling, sensation, or image is being given to me or that I have. I began just doing digital collage, but now I’ve moved into more traditional mediums like painting, sculpting, and performance to be able to expand myself in the ways I need to. For my upcoming show, I learned to work with about five new mediums to create what I needed for Chimerical Skies.”
“Since the beginning, my art has always been inspired by my spiritual ties and experiences.”
What does your art mean to you?
“Art is a way of staying in relationship—with ancestors, with place, with the unseen. It’s how I remember and reimagine. For me, it’s a form of devotion, grief-work, connectivity, and joy. Making art helps me explore questions that don’t have clear answers, and as I start creating, I often don’t fully understand the intricacies of what I’m expressing until it’s in front of me. I think exploring very human questions like what does it mean to survive, to shapeshift, and to love amidst an ever-changing world is incredibly important. I work so much with spirits, but in the end, it’s the corporeal world that I’m so fascinated with making sense of. I love so deeply this little life I have, the people in it, and the spirits that populate it, and it’s a little life I’ve worked very hard to create. My art is an extension of just that, a little life that creates to be seen.”
What’s your favourite artwork and why?
“I could essentially yap about this for hours, but I’ll pick a piece I saw recently at MoMA PS1, which was Flowers of Lifeby contemporary artist Selma Selman. The piece is of painted construction, grabbed from Selman’s family business of scrap metal sorting and salvaging, and it’s an ode to her late father, who taught her the family business. The piece is an enormous kinetic sculpture that is made richer by her performance, where she and members of her family extract the precious metals from the motherboards of discarded computers to create an entirely new piece. I think it’s a genius use of autobiographical experience and the utilization of one of the most beautiful languages, I believe, there is, which is resourcefulness. I also love the work of Afro-Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, whose incredible large-scale prints have such a deep aliveness to them that I usually wind up looking at them for hours.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“A recent project I’m especially proud of is Chimerical Skies: The Heavens Becoming New, a solo exhibition at Bushwick Gallery exploring the Persian Royal Stars through a Trans-Queer mythopoetic lens. The show includes visual installations and a live storytelling night where other Trans/Queer artists shared original folktales inspired by the stars. It was a celebration of Trans people and our celestial kinship with the stars as beings of motion and change. It’s been an incredible undertaking to create, and I hope to see you all there!”
Website: www.wherethewaterflows.net
Instagram: @where_the_water_flows_
