wingspan

Bard College at Simon’s Rock, May 2024, Visual Studies, summa cum laude. Advisor Zoey Lubitz, readers Jacob Fossum and Ben Krupka.

This collection of drawings, photographs, and mixed-media sculptures create a sensitive map of a disembodied self as they travel through space and non-space, seeking sovereignty. Inspired by how internal architectures of trauma and memory map onto physical contexts as landscapes change and lives are dislocated. This show is highly self-conscious of the cultural and symbolic context of the white cube gallery, being a “kind of non-space, ultra-space, or ideal-space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled.” (Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Dogherty). A central piece in this exhibit, “wingspan,” pushes the boundaries of sculptural ceramics to a nearly unrecognizable limit, resembling a huge steel marionette, as it floats suspended inside a welded frame.

*Wingspan*, 2024, ceramic, welded steel, airplane wire. 50”x55”x70” Location, Liechtenstein Center for the Arts, Pittsfield MA.
Sculpted from high-grog stoneware on a steel armature, cut off and hollowed, re-assembled with a slip and score technique, textured with over 500 individually sculpted feathers of fine stoneware, black underglaze, and fired to cone 10 in a reduction kiln. Made over two semesters.

*Codependence*, 2023. 20x36” Charcoal on paper.
This drawing and the one that follows are from a series which depicts monsters made of both human and animal parts. These embodiments of taboo and monstrosity are comments on my experience with gender queerness. By presenting these creatures as lovingly crafted creations, I hope to elicit a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer, and a respect for the mysterious.

*untitled*, 2023. 50x70” Charcoal on paper.
This drawing is the second in a series which depicts monsters made of both human and animal parts. These embodiments of taboo and monstrosity are comments on my experience with gender queerness. By presenting these creatures as lovingly crafted creations, I hope to elicit a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer, and a respect for the mysterious.

*A Third Space*, 2023, ceramic and welded steel 10x12x14”
Sculpted from high-grog stoneware on a steel armature, cut off and hollowed, re-assembled with a slip and score technique, fired to cone 10 in an oxidation kiln.

Archive of Dreams

Throughout my life I’ve had vivid and dramatic dreams. I'm prone to lucid dreaming, remembering everything when I wake up and sometimes struggling to orient myself between my experiences in dreams and waking life. A couple years ago, in a time of upheaval in my life, I began having thematically cohesive dreams - the same characters returning night after night, and imagery which felt strangely specific and meaningful. I began to think of these images as my companions, and these characters sculpturally as vessels which could serve as a body to my emotions. These vessels’ existence is fixed not only in space but in time. I need an architecture for my grief, a place for it to live (ideally in lieu of, or at least in addition to the cavities of my body.) In my dreams I am in that past time and place. It is present, we are in this house and it is our house. This notion of a text, book, or map which unfurls - something both indexical and alive is the foundation of The Archive of Dreams as it has come to manifest for this exhibition. You can access the full archive, including stories, for free on my substack.