Created by
Shiann Croft / Sincerely Shyy,
Fellow, Caring Cultures 2025
Published
February 6, 2026
A multimedia altar blending video and self‑portraits that celebrate Black feminist storytelling, honouring ancestral memory, joy, and care as acts of resistance and communal healing.
Project statement
The Coven is a multimedia altar that explores storytelling as a radical form of memory-keeping and care. Combining short-form video, self-portraiture in clay and paint, and poetic narrative, this project uplifts Black feminist traditions of grief, joy, and ancestral resistance. It challenges dominant archives by creating space for ritual, sound, and intergenerational witness as healing practice.
Narrative
In a world that has been stripped bare by violence — where Black bodies are battlegrounds and wombs bear the weight of histories no one dared to name — The Coven emerges as an act of fierce reclamation. This project is an altar built from the bones of our stories, a ritual space for memory, an offering for the women who taught us how to hold truth in our mouths, and still sing.
Here, storytelling is not soft. It is not passive. It is not just something we do, it’s who we are. Story is resistance. Story is care. It is the language our grandmothers braided into our scalps, the rhythm that lives in our hips, the hush in our mother’s voice when she said, “you come from something holy.” To speak our truths, to archive our lives, to turn memory into art — that is the work. That is the rebellion.
The video installation that anchors this work. It is a digital altar stitched from whispers and water, from poetry and pinned images, from the sonic remains of Black Joy, a retreat I curated to center Black mental health, storytelling, and communal unmasking. This altar does not just honor grief — it honors the living archive of Blackness. It gathers sound and memory the way our aunties gather around a table: with laughter, with ache, with a knowing that refuses to die.
The Coven
Directed by: Shiann Croft / Sincerely Shyy
Edited by: Crystal Tang
Soundscape and Voice: Shiann Croft
Sources of imagery:
– Archival footage from Black Joy Retreat, curated by Shiann Croft
– Select visual references sourced via Pinterest (used for atmospheric and cultural context)
Alongside this altar are my self-portraits — formed through the rituals of paint, clay, and the gaze. But these are not just portraits. They are portals. Each one opens into something older than me: a memory that belongs to all of us. In clay, I found the language of the body. In pigment, I found the fire of those who came before me. Every brushstroke, every pressed fingerprint, became a conversation—between what we remember and what has been remembered for us.
Self-Portrait in Clay #1
Artist: Shiann Croft / Sincerely Shyy
Medium: Clay, mixed media, digital photography
Date: 2025
This fellowship called me deeper into that conversation. Not to document pain, but to make room for the fullness of our becoming. In clay’s refusal to be rushed, I learned to listen to silence. In painting, I learned that color remembers what language forgets. And in story — in the layering of voice, image, and rhythm — I found the archive our people have always carried in their chests.
Grief might be in the room, but it is no longer the only guest. What lives here is much broader: Black joy, Black rage, Black curiosity, and Black futurism. This altar was never just about mourning. It was about memory as medicine. It was about the way Black women gather around a table and speak each other back into wholeness.
To tend to care as an artist is to become an archivist of the everyday sacred. It is to witness the world through the eyes of your auntie, your cousin, your younger self. It is knowing that care doesn’t always sound like healing — it sometimes sounds like testimony. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s tired. But it always shows up. Through these portraits, through sound, through the curation of image and breath, I am building an altar to the stories we weren’t supposed to remember.
Self-Portrait in Paint #2 – “Memory As Fire”
Artist: Shiann Croft / Sincerely Shyy
Medium: Clay, mixed media, digital photography
Date: 2025
Self-Portrait in Clay & Adornment #3 – “Womb Work”
Artist: Shiann Croft / Sincerely Shyy
Medium: Clay sculpture, ancestral adornment, digital photography
Date: 2024
Source: Original work
The Coven refuses the idea that Black storytelling must only center trauma. Instead, it insists that our lives — our voices, our rituals, our art — are archives in themselves. They are not in museums; they are in our homes, our kitchens, our dances, our scars, our laughter. They are passed through the womb, not the institution. This is the work of Black feminist storytelling/ memory-making. It is not linear. It is not tidy. But it is real. And it is ours.
© Shiann Croft, 2025.
All texts, video, and artwork are published with the permission of the artist. The creation and publication of this work was made possible with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Government of Canada, Ontario Arts Council, and Government of Ontario.