“I am deeply committed to merging art practices with care work, and as part of the many mutual aid missions I work on, I aim to make art practice, somatics, and possibilities to grieve more accessible to London communities—especially those experiencing the most isolation, various forms of marginalization, and unmet access needs.”

In the seminal text The Body Keeps the Score (2014), trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk gives us a different perspective on trauma and healing, warning us that the body 'refuses to be ignored' and that healing requires allowing us to inhabit our bodies, respecting what we feel and know in the moment.

This therapeutic framework found space within the contemporary art world, with artists adopting diverse methodologies to honour the body's inner intelligence, whether as a way to process individual trauma or as a collective expression of care. Exemplifying this somatic turn is Yaya's interdisciplinary practice, precisely their animated film Into the Next Tide, which transforms straight-ahead animation into a healing modality that brings clarity and space for communities to engage with difficult experiences and cultivate resilience.

Screened as part of the installations of Queer Migrations Festival at Firepit Art Gallery and beneath Regent's Canal bridge during the London Design Festival, Into the Next Tide functions as a living visual essay and embodied research. The artist film's unique animation technique, rooted in deliberately improvised animation—channelling strokes through "wrist movement" while borrowing from "improv dancing"—creates a moving record of a healing experience and process that refuses conventional narrative protocols. A protest against conventional healing practices. 

Even more, the artist's film represents a collection of positive somatic memories. Mirroring the symbolic resonance of the seashells and pebbles collected during Yaya's periods of recuperation, this film serves as both a conduit and a repository for future re-engagement, inviting viewers to embrace art as a restorative practice, akin to the artist's own journey.

“In periods of my life where disability affects me the most, I enjoy documenting my process, without the pressure of recovery but simply holding myself through existing in those moments.” The artist explains. ”I enjoy documenting the sensory inputs coming from objects collected on a walk, like seashells, pebbles and other rocks from different sea shores, or the somatic memories made from light improv dancing and movement that help me have an outlet when drawing doesn’t feel possible.”

On another front, Yaya's watercolor portraits on rice paper reveal a journey inwards that transcends into a conceptually rigorous territory. The series Queer Portraits of Wombs, Migration and the Lotus Feet is a profound meditation on inherited trauma and body autonomy, or the loss of it. One major reference for this series is the artist's family history, including their great-grandmother's experience with foot binding and several generations of migration by sea, from workers to political refugees. This exploration of mobility is also tied to the cruel fate met by women from the Lotus Feet era, bridging the intersectionality of being trans, migrant, and their family history. The artist thus creates a language that goes beyond the individual, becoming the voice of their ancestors and community.

Moreover, the material used in this series is also an integral part of the conceptual narrative, as rice paper's inherent unpredictability is a vehicle for a more vulnerable and less technical narrative, one that leads us where "water travels," beyond conscious control.

Yaya’s commitment to fostering collective care and healing is powerfully manifested through their community workshops, meticulously facilitated across various UK locations, including Phytology at the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, Peaks of Color in Sheffield, Earth Tenders in Dulwich, and Community Apothecary in Waltham Forest. Through diverse outdoor art practices—ranging from nature walks and clay sculpting to grief-tending outdoors, plant identification, and herbarium workshops documenting wildlife—Yaya cultivates a unique methodology that profoundly embodies the radical acceptance of impermanence and the liberating potential of letting go. These collective gatherings and their ephemeral sculptures, designed to return to the soil, serve as the artist's potent interpretation of "way-marking in reverse", prioritising process over preservation and functioning as a profound practice of grief-tending aimed at reconnecting fragmented pieces of one’s somatic network.

What distinguishes Yaya's practice from other trauma-informed art is its sophisticated understanding of time as cyclical rather than progressive. Rather than positioning healing as destination, they propose grief as "day-to-day practice, incarnated in each little step taken." This temporal restructuring challenges not only therapeutic orthodoxy but also capitalism's demand for measurable recovery outcomes.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

Queer Portraits of Wombs, Migration and the Lotus Feet by Yaya.

All images courtesy of Yaya.