STATEMENT:
i am a slum kid and i am a scholar.
my work focuses on family, conversation and sometimes food. i use intermedia –a mix of photography, video, and audio – to create a diverse range of installations that are heavily researched and curated. navigating family in an unfamiliar place involved a trip to croatia where i located a village of my last name on the side of a mountain in the northern part of the country (photo on left or above). i shared a meal with an unknown relative, milan, and learned that my paternal ancestors come from this place.
in the fall of 2018 my stepfather, who has been with my mother for over 20 years, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. his outcome for survival according to experts at johns hopkins is very low, under 30% chance. i received the phone call of his prognosis while i was at the ocean with my husband. untitled (ocean) is a video and haiku that explores my state of mind at the time of hearing about his illness.
i have been thinking about death lately. not with a negative connotation, but more in the japanese wabi sabi philosophical tradition of the beauty in adoration for the imperfect, the dying, the decayed. after much research, reading, writing, and conversing, it is obvious that my experiences–sometimes tough, depressing, stressful–have a large influence on my work. in fact, most if not all of the work that i have made recently has been the direct result of something difficult that i had to experience within my family, be it murder (death) or disease (decay). but the end product is not meant to be a discouraging result of the impulse that the work seeks to explore. it is more meant to serve as a small reliquary of my experience, like the closure one seeks after a bad breakup, as a way to preserve a part of my past that holds significance. i have a love for loving and a yearning for knowing and a need for creating.
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BIO:
delivuk currently lives in baltimore, maryland and teaches time-based media at anne arundel community college. she has a master of fine arts in intermedia and digital arts from the university of maryland baltimore county. she also has a master of fine arts in new media from the george washington university.
published thesis: what do you say?
published thesis: navigating family