SANDPLAY
BY KAYA WILKINS
19 AUGUST – 21 SEPTEMBER 2021
Etage Projects is pleased to present SANDPLAY, Kaya Wilkins’ first solo show with the gallery. Kaya Wilkins is a Norwegian-American Berlin-based musician, composer, and artist who records and performs as Okay Kaya.
Soft Touch Sand Play
Dora on the ground that’s me
A calf made from foam I
Used to have a vision of fields till
Harsh creator deemed all eyes uncertain So, soft I’m
Cloth not to brag we sure are all the same Let me show you around
Mama is a baby in the corner Grandmothers invisible, a smell she’s Pointy nails painted Pearl imagine
Dirt from yard work building
Brown bridges under layers of thick varnish Gonna poke back some day I’m
Stuffed and stitched and sewn together by Sharp leather needles
Remember that
Spooky hospital show
Little brother knivery
On bleach damned road
Basically that’s how I too have grown Now bed, stay dry
Mama Baby says there’s no need to see Here I am made immobile
Never will I have to
Shake one fist at the ceiling, my fellow fixture Plus! She adds
You can omit the world is burning for
Pearls grandmother is a shelf what a rack
Drank and smoked until her skin shed to the core Not able to lift a light
Dead, a loneliness ancestral she
Is Bones a
Vessel a tray we apply in
Sandplay
Let me explain
No wait I
Forget death as icing
Glazed cake all grim
To unmask
A lust for an ending
Gorging on edges
Does not make you an empath
Mama Baby, Pearl and Bones all get it wrong
Let me explain
Sandplay
Could look like infantile chess? Armless and obscured they begin I
(A nightmare:
Icing sticks out their tongue into shape
Of a thumb pressed into the socket of one of my hypothetical slits)
Forgot who took the limbs of MB
Her sight got snatched by a dildo tired of
Wet apples rolling around a bowl
They are less likely to hit you across the mouth if you don’t bat lashes or mock
One may start
To suspect she chopped her arms off herself maybe Mistook them for crutches reaching
To be held in love is a sport one should opt out of I Can still hear her bleating heart but
In this
Game, body is all you need
Nothing is quite like sand I
Listen to the non sound of plenty grains passing through
Whatever extremity like a
Cheat sheet of the formative years It takes a village so to speak Choose your character there’s Unlimited prototypes turned siblings Piece in formation
3:2 4:1
We oscillate linking roles before us Figurines figure
Mother is all
Nurture is
Self contained I Let me explain
TEXT BY THE ARTIST