Pulling from an interdisciplinary practice rooted in modern dance and sculpture, I create installations that examine humanity’s complex history of territorial claim, the perception of progress, and the potential of a body destabilized. I gravitate toward objects, places, individuals, and communities witnessing significant change—those on the threshold of metamorphosis, the precipice of the unknown, an end and beginning simultaneously. In my research, I attempt to examine how larger phenomena affect regional identity and subsequently impact individual experience. I seek an immersion in the opportunities and challenges of the present while leaving abundant room for the unexpected to serve as guide.
To reach a deeper understanding of representations that depict experience in place over time, I use search engines as a tool to interpret and inhabit the world beyond my own heritage and environment, sensing how an object, image, or idea has evolved and is perceived online. To counter a purely digital approach, I conduct site visits, gathering information from institutions and residents deeply connected to place. What is learned from these exchanges is perpetually illuminating and often reveals an unusual network bridging topics such as etymology, economic and geographical history, ecological change, folklore, and pop culture (to name a few). These nuances, which cannot be understood via remote research and conversations, are key in identifying components that directly impact material, process, and design decisions. The resulting installations are constellations of collected research, fusions of physical and digital information that visually manifest interconnected concepts—human ingenuity and peril, consumption and regeneration, vulnerability and resilience.
Recent inquiries have focused on cumulative structures influencing environmental instability – political ecology’s pursuit of resources undermining conservation efforts to protect biodiversity, political economy’s increasing governance of bodies, and the uncanny relationship between Polar and Space exploration amid climate collapse.
As the Thwaites glacier deteriorates and Northwest Passage thaws, as shipping routes become more viable and artifacts from lost expeditions are found, dependent ecosystems are forever changed. Simultaneously the billionaire space race intensifies. SpaceX deploys satellite constellations, engineers posit extraterrestrial waste stream purge, and entrepreneurs mine asteroids in the search for raw materials. Aquifers deplete and wildfires rage as concerns regarding Arctic Cold War competition for nonrenewable resources renew. Residents of sinking island communities migrate to the mainland as Mars crews embark on simulated red planet missions.
Piloting a drone in the Arctic prompted this inquiry, which envisions a threshold between worlds – a well of uncertainty offering generative potential. The works created are experiments in evolution – an inquiry into seeing as believing, a levitation resisting unpredictable ground, and a re-evaluation of departure as becoming.