The delicate relationship between our existence as material and concept is at the heart of my work within the series, Flight Patterns of Empty Energy.  I use the body as a site in which to explore this ambiguity.  Simultaneously rooted and vaporous, we are physical—materials which erode, decay, and cease to exist, while also intangible—thoughts and dreams, which are fleeting. The materials that I work with include: photographs, glass, ice, video projections, and time-based media.  I use these materials metaphorically to illustrate the ambiguity of the body as well as the mutability of memory and identity.

As humans, we are physical—materials which erode, decay, and cease to exist, and also intangible—thoughts and dreams, which are fleeting.  Within this installation, I use the elemental materials of the body and explore how they can be reconstituted sculpturally.  For example in one piece, I froze the amount of water of two bodies into a solid piece of ice.  Bit by bit, sliver by sliver, the ice melts into a shallow black box, until becoming liquid.  Completely filling the vessel, the liquid is held by surface tension, creating a reflecting pool.  The pool mirrors a gauze-like fabric suspended above the water, equivalent to the surface area of the two bodies.  Eventually the liquid evaporates and ends its journey from solid, to liquid, to gas.  This piece embodies the desire to contain a moment in time, to freeze one’s love, to face the reality that as material we are ever changing. 

Another piece in the series, Breathing Wall, consists of eleven light boxes.  Each of the photographs has a light source placed behind it, which is synched to a timer which makes the light pulsate on and off according to my particular breath-rate.  This work references the microscopic changes of the body that occur with each breath, as the breath is a site of change and transformation.  As Salman Rushdie states, “the first frontier was the water's edge, and there was a first moment, when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary, and found it could breathe”.  When in love, partners mirror each other's gestures and their heartbeat and breathing synch.  As you learn how to meditate, it is the breath, the exchange of inside and outside, which you focus on, until even that dissolves. 

The piece, Uprooted: Residue of Body, uses a scanning apparatus originally designed for geophysicists.  The scan of the bodies become merely points on a map—a kind of visual solar system of sorts; a mapping of the relationship of two bodies.  This piece is closely linked to Flight Patterns which depict my personal flight patterns—a lithographic map of all the pieces my body has been.

Glass: a curious liquid and solid.  We too morph, mutate, and change over time.  As glass windowpanes age they become thicker at their base.  Even after firing they retain aspects, latent memories, of their liquid nature.  The piece, Vessel: Body as Water, is a slumped glass sculpture that will hold the volume of my body. 

Fundamentally, my work explores how quantities of material that comprise the body can be restructured and fabricated artistically to explore the connection between body and material, place and other.