Toni in the Rio Grande
Cyanoprint and Watercolour on Hand Dyed Fabric, 36’’x 63’’
Toni Gentilli is an artist, curator, and anthropologist whose research-based mixed media
work explores relationships between technology, nature, perception and consciousness.
Q: What is your relationship to the environment/nature going back to childhood,
and moving forward to now?
“I remember being a wild child, spending all of my time outside...growing up before screen-
time...living in the Midwest, it was just boundless, fenceless, you know fields and forest...my
grandfather was a biologist and when I was really young he got me hooked on learning about
birds, rocks, planets, and butterflies. And I think he influenced my interest in studying Archeol-
ogy...which in my mind is really a study of how humans relate to place in geographically spe-
cific and culturally specific ways...
Q: Can you speak to what your relationship is to illness?
When I found out about my first chronic disease I was taking my first photography class and I
was out in a field that had a barn that had been taken down and there were stairs the went to
nowhere... and I was going up to frame the shot and I ended up stepping on a nail. So, I went
to the doctor, and...they found out something was wrong with my thyroid gland and they said I
had Hashimoto's disease, which is hypo-thyroidism...I didn’t have control over my metabolism
or my hormones...Then, when I went to grad school in Arizona...I started losing weight, I had
no energy, my thinking was fuzzy...and I found out I had type one diabetes. I’ve been insulin-
dependent since I was 20 years old. I was a very healthy person, a vegetarian and hiking 20
miles a day, I didn’t understand how I got diabetes? Later, I started coughing up blood...I also
lost a significant amount of vision in my right eye...I later figured out I had Valley Fever,
which is a fungal infection in my lung from doing archaeology work.
I’m waiting...what’s the next thing? What part of me is going to fall off next...? A part of me
feels lucky because I am pretty high functioning but it’s a fucking cruel joke because I look
OK, but nobody knows that I’m literally falling apart from the inside out...and how much that
eats away at you emotionally and psychologically every single day. And I don’t always have
the energy and the wear-with-all to be happy and to support everyone else and do everything
for them because I feel like shit...but it’s also the thing of being a woman and “you are being
overly dramatic and it’s all in your head” and that’s really frustrating.
About 75% of all immunological diseases affect women worldwide. And I just feel like in so many ways we are the canaries in the coal mine for whatever is happening all around us. I get so angry about the fact there is this entrenched history of dismissing women’s intuitive understanding and knowing of their own bodies...dismissing that as being overly sensitive, or emotional, or dramatic, or needy. It makes me so mad when I hear that kind of stuff. It’s been a weird gift to me in that I
don’t take anything for granted and I can’t dwell on the negative facts of it. My creative prac-
tice became a really cathartic practice for me. I continue to look for lessons in my illness and
flip that into ways to care for self, care for others, and to care for the environment because it is
also precious and tender and finite. And needs tending. And it’s not always going to be healthy
and OK. You can’t take it for granted. It led me to working with materials that I had been
working with in a different way because my eyesight had changed and my relationship to the
camera had changed and I was thinking about how there is this incredible transformation of en-
ergy and light with photography...And how that was really an analog for everyone’s bodies:
we are chemical transformations from stardust and plants and animals and everything we con-
sume makes us what we are. Really looking at that interconnectedness and cyclical energy and
matter helped me to deepen my connection and appreciation for the natural world through my
artwork.”