Statement

I work with paper as a kind of skin: a material that illuminates, softens, tears, absorbs, and records its experience. Cast from my own body, paper becomes a second skin and a proxy body, capable of being held, supported, worn, damaged, and transformed. Through repeated acts of making and remaking, I explore what a body holds, what it releases, and how it is shaped by water, gravity, light, touch, and the presence of other bodies.

My work places one body within another. A paper form retains the trace of a body that is no longer there, then enters new relationships with landscape, water, light, and other people. I shepherd these forms through recurring cycles of transformation, carrying them into the landscape and offering them to water. In performance, the material's vulnerability and resilience extend into the hands of others, where an audience may become the support that keeps a body afloat and where care becomes a shared physical act.

Across sculpture, video, photography, and performance, I make visual and conceptual connections between the intimate architecture of the body and the larger forces that surround and shape it. Human tissue echoes cosmic structures; a paper skin is ingested by the body from which it was cast; the surface of water can hold what is above and below it while reflecting the body back to itself. I am drawn to moments when materials reveal something beyond my control: the unexpected strength of a paper body supporting itself without reinforcement, the shifting patterns of light, or the movement of water around a sinking form that gradually becomes a shroud.

These repeated gestures are, for me, a devotional practice of connection. Through ritual, attention, and acts of care, I create situations in which material, body, landscape, and viewer enter into relation with one another. The work asks how presence can be made visible and how a life, even after the body has transformed, continues to leave its traces.

Thesis: Tracings, Embodied

Artist Talk, Lesley College of Art + Design, January 7, 2022