STATEMENT OF WORK

I am obsessed with support structures and display strategies. For years I have stared at, researched and photographed all sorts of armatures that prop things up, from posing stands used in early portrait photography to hold subjects still for long exposures to museum armatures that display ancient fragments.  I am in awe of their power to fix bodies in position for impossible to hold durations, and the tenderness of their caress as they elevate broken sculptures, giving them an estranged second life in a museum. I make sculptures that are inspired by support structures that exist in the world, and I relate my body to them through sculptural representation and embodied practice with photography. The work engages seriously and playfully with the posturing, transformation and loss that armatures and display tactics represent. Thinking of these armatures as a metaphor for the kind of supports we rely on in our lives, my practice challenges outsized standards of beauty and health, and is an exploration of bodily interdependence and care.

My most recent work points this obsession at the tools and architectures of medical support. Like me, through decades of living with illness, and medical treatment and surveillance, my sculptures inhabit a space between flesh and technology. I have developed a visual vocabulary for abstracting figurative forms, which is inspired by the aesthetics of hospital furniture and medical surfaces - what I refer to as “comfort corners” and “fleshy plastics.” With this work, I am seeking to give physical and visual form to the largely invisible and marginalized experience of internalizing medical support.