Infinite Body, plaster, brass, thread, 68 x 48 x 52” (variable), 2021
I first started thinking about this idea around the body being stripped down, flayed, raw and open. As I began to work, it also became about inhabiting space and time differently in a spiritual and metaphysical iteration of the self within that stripped down state- a physical manifestation of the invisible but true self.
The body actually becomes infinite, spread and mapped out in a wrinkled grid, like the space-time continuum. Infinite Body is a portrait of my interior space, able to expand and contract, open and close, be micro and macro. I think of the casts of my hands and feet as the grounding elements that tie the piece to this time and this moment. The wrinkled grid becomes a proxy for me in different times, places and mental understandings. During the pandemic when we were uprooted and all the belongings that we chose to keep were in boxes, I thought of this piece: the last thing I worked on before we packed up our lives. Although making it was a physical action, it spent almost a year incubating in a small box where my mind would travel from afar and think about it, and work on it, in the abstract. I loved that I could collapse a version of myself into a tiny space and reside in the darkness of the unknown, and then after gestation, I could unbox it and unfold myself to float in the air and occupy a different time and place.