CHURCH GOIN’ MULE

Church Goin Mule is a southern artist who was born and raised across the south, her kinfolk came from the mountains, and she keeps her studio in the Mississippi delta today.

Church Goin Mule's work is a memory jug, a death-vase mash of the collective southern past, pearls and rusted nails, song and story, lore and loss. The mule is our common ground, the creature that every man, woman and child of all origin knew, in a time before t-models and tractors.
In a time of remarkable and perhaps increasing polarity, the mule is our grounding rod, pointing to not a better past, but a different one.
The blues was born behind a plowing mule. Stories and poems, jokes and songs were prolific about the south's four legged machine. Like much of our history, it's been forgotten and framed to tell a different tale. That story is a well known one, of glory and triumph. Our true story, our true flag is the white one of surrender, and of hard work, poverty and loss.

The mule was the first hybrid and he was always there, able to work harder, live longer, eat less. He stood beside moonshiners, levee builders, cotton farmers, timber-haulers, oil drillers, sugar cane men. He worked six days and brought his folks to church and town on the seventh.