The bodies I craft bulge, grow and break down. Their holes and orifices slowly release and leak onto the floor. Their taut skin stretches and pulls; leaving soft lines across their surfaces. Through my work, I grapple with how it feels to inhabit our bodies, these every-shifting forms. Exploring the ways they hold together all the mushy, heavy, fragile pieces.
My materials draw from the domestic skills learned from my mother, the labor and tenderness in daily tasks, such as these, passed from her body to mine. Through these sculptural forms, I reclaim these materials and processes, giving them new spaces and forms. Using rising dough to explore expansion and constriction, allowing cloth sculptures to leak and ooze, blowing air to slowly disperse the feathery insides of a comforter, using my hair to stitch my body to my mother’s.
The bodily forms and processes in my work draw on the often-gendered experiences of weeping, urination, menstruation, miscarriage and pregnancy. Each work shifting over the course of an exhibition to convey these slow processes of change or disintegration. Through these material surrogates each work makes porous the boundaries of interior and exterior. Giving form to the ways our body takes in and expels matter; the feelings of expansion, heaviness and fullness and those of emptying out, of breaking down. The way these moments shift our seemingly solid edges and reveal our porous boundaries. They remind us that we are dying, changing, decaying vessels, loosely contained by skin, muscle, and bone.