Rachel Tomlinson Dick, musician, artist
Photo by Lindsay Trapnell
Rachel Tomlinson Dick is performing Thursday night with The Wayward Little Satan Daughters. She shares with Les Femmes Folles about her sheltered childhood and how music became her escape route, writing, making art and performing, volunteering for Omaha Girls Rock, the ubiquitous effects gender has on personal lives and institutions, and how Omaha has the potential to be an incredible place to be a woman in the arts…
Tell me about your background/where you’re from.
I was born and raised here in Omaha. My childhood was fairly strange in a number of ways. I was homeschooled from kindergarten up through high school. My household was also devoutly religious and I was quite sheltered until I was able to begin sneakily branching out from that in my teen years. Music was my escape route. I began playing guitar when I was fourteen and formed my first band at fifteen with my best friend, Melissa Amstutz, who I still play music with in Honeybee & Hers and The Wayward Little Satan Daughters. I was able to find, to create, physical and psychic space within the arts, to indentify and form relationships with like-minded people, and to construct a sense of self and a reality that ultimately did not feel incredibly oppressive to me. Art and music were also significant coping mechanisms for me. To create was always this kind of portal, and this mechanism for truth-telling, and ultimately healing, which has enabled me to maintain my identity and reality even in the face of opposition.
I took a bit of time in which I put artistic endeavors on the back burner and went to the University of Nebraska at Omaha and pursued a degree in Women’s & Gender Studies, Sociology, and French. I also obtained some valuable experience during that time in political organizing and got the opportunity to serve as the Director of the Women’s Resource Center on campus my senior year. Upon finishing my degree in May of 2010, I made the decision to postpone graduate school and kind of rededicate myself to music and art.
Tell me about all that you do - performance, studies, other creative endeavors…
My primary creative undertaking currently is music. I play lead guitar in Honeybee and Hers, and play guitar, sing and write songs in The Wayward Little Satan Daughters. I have a solo project under the moniker Miniature Horse, and also sing and play guitar in a fairly sporadic project called Hawk Feather.
Along with songwriting, I also write poetry and short fiction. I make visual art too, which typically entails mixed media pieces involving embroidery and textiles. I took part in a performance art piece earlier this summer with my dear friend, Kristin Lubbert, entitled “The Shame of Isis.”
Perhaps the two endeavors that I value the most though have been helping form the Omaha Women’s Art Collective, and taking part in Omaha Girls Rock summer camp as an instrument instructor and band coach.
Rachel teaching for Omaha Girls Rock; photo by Lindsay Trapnell
Tell me about your next performance.
Last weekend Honeybee & Hers had a show to celebrate the release of our album “Morning,” which has been about three years in the making.
This Thursday, September 29th, The Wayward Little Satan Daughters will be playing a show at the Waiting Room with Conduits, Outlaw Con Bandana, and Thunder Power, which is a heavy-duty grrrl power line up booked by Conduits frontwoman, friend, and Women’s Art Collective member Jenna Morrison.
The Wayward Little Satan Daughters is a much more political, in-your-face project that focuses on critiquing a lot of the oppression women face in a patriarchal society, particularly one so significantly infused with Judeo-Christian religious ideology and an unfettered capitalist value system.
Do you think being a woman impacts your craft and/or career?
I do. Living in a society that designates and dichotomizes gender in a manner such as ours does, I believe the effects are ubiquitous, both personally and institutionally. Being a woman affects both what I create and the opportunities and opposition that I am presented with as an artist. I don’t necessarily believe in some inherent feminine, but I believe that the intensity of gender enculturation impacts the self in profound ways.
Do you think Omaha is a good place to be a woman in the arts?
Omaha can be a very challenging place as a female artist, but there has been some incredible momentum created by women here as of late. Les Femmes Folles is an excellent example of this, along with the Omaha Girls Rock Summer Camp, the Omaha Women’s Art Collective, and such women founded projects as The Union for Contemporary Art, Esoteric Velvet, Film Streams – the list goes on and on. I really believe that women are tired of a lot of the good old boy bullshit and relegation to secondary positions that are still pervasive here and are fighting to create their own space. Because of this work, I believe that in ten years Omaha will likely be an incredible place to be a woman in the arts.
When the Omaha Women’s Art Collective began meeting last fall, everyone had seemingly endless stories to tell about oppression they had faced as female artists, which often takes the form of condescension or simply being completely overlooked, but perhaps more significantly as female human beings. Whether it be street harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, which takes many forms other than just physical harm, inequality in the workplace, unequal representation within governing bodies, and distorted and dangerous representations in the mass media, we live in a society that seeks to silence women on a large scale. Although these issues are not often recognized as directly related to our artistic endeavors as women, they very much are. Women do not create in a vacuum, we exist and create in a society that constrains and undervalues us from birth. This engenders claiming space as an artist with specific difficulty for women, however I do not believe that this must always be the case. I have an incredible amount of hope for a future filled with even more incredible creations carried out by strong, tenacious, and empowered women, and a society that is vastly improved for all people because of these contributions.
____
Rachel Tomlinson Dick performs with the Wayward Little Satan Daughters Thursday, September 29, alongside the Conduits, starting at 9p.m. Tickets are $7 at the door. For more information visit waitingroomlounge.com.
