My creative practice is a personal attempt to show how art objects are the presentation of their agency and subsequent "play" that requires the spectator to actively engage in dialogue with said objects. I aspire to deconstruct existing in an environment that overlaps the seen and seeing through performances of meditative ritualistic actions that elicits the bizarre emotion of the knowing that knows itself. For this reflection to occur, I immerse myself in both the task and my environment when hand-spinning coiling lengths of yarn, mending, and weaving to construct large-scale hide and textile installations.

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These acts of meditation on discipline and endurance are demonstrated in my works in which I sat still for several hours while plaster and glue-drenched canvas dried around my body. These casts are a metaphorical yet literal translation from “world to word.” Arresting this moment of endurance while simultaneously breaking away from the cast in an act of molting from my own body, I leave behind an objective and necessary permanence of transformation as a skin or cocoon. Simultaneously, I address the themes of mortality through humorous yet macabre representations of myself in positions of slaughtered cattle while celebrating the positive qualities in our limitedness through themes of livestock and its by-products—allowing me to reflect on these transient moments.

 

By using hides as relics of ritualistic actions and my own body as an instrument in my artistic practice, my art invites viewers to a sensory experience that blur the lines between sculpture and performance—highlighting trauma and violence acted upon the bodies of both human and non-human participants. I am able to examine the craft process in relationship with the feminine, historically regulated domestic task with a sort of playful attitude. This active engagement demonstrates the absurdity and immobility I feel as both a woman confined by these traditional acts of endurance and the reverence for our limitedness that allows lived experiences that realizes sensations.