They Eat Each Other’s Bodies

In my practice, I walk a lot, in both urban and forested environments. In these walks, I maintain an intense level of engaged observation. Through the use of unusual materials in my work, the studio becomes boundaryless. Forests, parking lots, basements, and the kitchen all become sites of making. My life is an ever-evolving system of experiments. If I see a rusted piece of metal on the ground I will take it to see how the rust could grow or how it will interact if I immerse it in copper sulphate and maple syrup. I have microbes growing in tubes on my windowsill, in petri dishes in cupboards, in jars in the kitchen. I sample everything to see how it will look under a microscope. Some of these experiments result in finished artworks, while others remain ongoing. I rarely abandon an experiment. I am an anxious hoarder of materials because once you reach a point where you recognize that something has potential to be an actant, it becomes sacred and irreplaceable.

In the process of art-making, I act impulsively and intuitively. It is through art that I better understand my relationship and responsibility to the world and physical matter around me. I live most of my life in my head. Growing up as an only child, with primarily plants and animals as friends, I looked for connections within the non-human world. It is through the relational process of becoming intimate and intentional through feeling, interacting, and affecting non-human organisms and matter that I connect and can perceive the interconnectivity between and with the world. It’s when I see how the materials I put into relation with each other react and affect that I begin to understand my place in the world, viewing myself not necessarily as human, but as an active material that affects others. I don’t look to make representations of the things I see, but to invite the processes of the vibrant matter around me into collaboration.

I allow each idea to feed the next. It is rare to have a new idea that isn’t fed with the body of the old, although the new idea might take on entirely different forms. I reuse both physical and conceptual materials from past projects, limiting single-use artworks and creating cycles of breakdown and reimagining past work and ideas. I walk, I read, I allow my ideas to eat each other’s bodies.

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