My current body of work evolves from an investigation of personal, collective and empathetic anxieties. In my drawings, installations and prints, ambiguous human and botanical biological systems combine to inform fictionalized observed living subjects. These specimens emerge from an imagined empirical study. In the face of what seems inevitable extinction these bodies thrive. They posit the notion that strength, pain, humor, toxicity can be embodied even as we observe a constant stream of violence, environmental disaster and species vulnerability. I often wonder how we process the influx of our daily and global realities and where in the body we absorb these truths. When I make my work I call upon my own body, and am aware of the liminal space where my attention fluctuates between intimate and vast, and where internal and external somatic phenomena often seems collapsible and enigmatic.
How do we embrace the paradox of all that is vital in a time of condemned inevitability? My conjured forms reflect a buildup of our exquisite psychosomatic scar tissue within biological systems. The process of making these drawings channels unease as the intricate line-work engages my desire for repetition and is directed towards the transformation of ache through imagined forms.
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The w(H)ole is an image I first drew in the summer of 2016 and has since been a recurring part of my visual language. In contrast to the specimen drawings I make, which suggest botanical-human hybrid systems, the w(H)oles are structurally simple forms that reference the specimen’s cellular make-up. Resembling muscular or intestinal ellipses, they recall many archetypal and ubiquitous forms in nature, the relationship between the individual and the collective, orifices in bodies and the physical form of an exhale.
The w(H)oles began as witnesses to time passing, memories collecting, regrets emerging and my own resilience in the context of this accumulation. They hold the paradoxical notion that life can embody transformation and continuation, withstanding loss and remorse. That humans can thrive, embodying vital moments and growth despite inevitable toxic build-up from our pasts and global realities situates these forms. We are all empty and full, whole and fragmented, negotiating impact and adaptation as living bodies inhabiting all the spaces that lie within.
“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety to a person – into something whole.” – Louise Bourgeois