we are the material to be dissolved, 2015
BFA Thesis exhibition, Columbus College or Art and Design, Columbus, OH
The sculpture, drawing and performance works explore processes of productive unmaking. The objects result through prolonged repetitive actions such as pulling threads, squeezing clay, marking a surface, or uttering words. Through these penetrative actions, I attempt to dissolve fixed notions of the self along with the solid object. I work to question my experience as a discrete and contained body, in order to acknowledge the inherent instability of what I as a body can know. By engaging deeply in these actions of dematerialization and accumulation, I make contact with the quiet but constant uncertainty of the boundaries of our mental and physical world – the unclear distinctions between inside and outside, self and world, sensing and knowing.
In the Unweaving pieces, I dismantle lengths of cotton fabric over weeks or months, by pulling warp from weft thread by thread. The unwoven forms are presented in various stages of unmaking, hung or draped precariously in space. As inside and outside are no longer clearly defined, they exist as evidence of permeability, physical intimacy, and heightened vulnerability. In the Field drawings, I allow a single mark to repeat with no plan of composition, responding instead to moment-to-moment shifts in orientations of the marks. The resulting map-like drawings embody a dialectic of control and loss of control.
Everything is this thing, 2015
audio recording and performance
