STATEMENT
it always comes back to bleeding out,
vivisection–
an intricate display of the parts of myself that transformed
and lost any sense of clarity along the way
i spilled my guts so you don’t have to–
i rearranged them because that was inevitable anyways
my history exists within sentimental objects in the same way it is transcribed onto my skin–showing signs of everything but revealing nothing immediately specific or recognizable without speculation. these objects are those i have carried with me and held close– stained bedsheets, grandparent scissors, used bandages, surgery drains, hrt supplies, charred instruments, artifacts from my artmaking process– those saturated with personal memories, conflict, and weight. tending to these objects is a ritual of mourning, examination, and meditation. this ritual is an exploitation and exploration of a worldview shaped by trauma, Queerness and neurodivergence– one that is foundationally contradictory and subversive.
my practice is informed by radical Queer conversations and the dynamic character of memory and perception. i examine how personal and object history mutually inform and reshape each other in a highly unstable, fluid manner. the act of sculpting offers a physical, bodily dimension to the ongoing interaction of interpretation and sentimentalization.
i consider how the labor of holding onto something saturated in memories is exhausting. continuing to work with the sentimental object, allowing it to transform in the same ways i have, and continuing to bleed myself out onto it is an extension of this labor. my work is a language of self-destruction as much as it is one of self-actualization.
like pulling my nerves out in one,
drawn out
motion
and accepting the way it felt
to be reborn
to be so tense–
to analyze my body like a surgeon
if i had to dissect myself limb from limb:
i am queering the politicized, economized, colonized, and cisgender-heteronormative conceptions of “genitals,” “gender,” and “sexuality” by discussing them in blurred, grotesque, and multl-faceted visualizations. interlacing these divisive categorizations with conversations of memory, experience, and trauma further abstracts them and strips them of their ability to control through discipline, exclusion, and division.
i refuse the notion of digestibility* as a discursive response to the normative structures of classification used to otherize, control, and subjugate living bodies. my work simultaneously occupies and enmeshes the spaces of yonic and phallic, feminine and masculine, bodily and abstract. my work rejects binary distinctions, as does my very existence, so as to support the effort to dismantle and disempower these arbitrary sociological distinctions through an ontology of Queerness, transience, and abstraction.
*digestibility as in: having single interpretations, clearly defined storylines or origins, falling under binary categories or constraints, readily understandable/translatable.
i inscribe discarded* objects with a significance of Queerness, self-actualization, and self-abstraction. i am dissecting and monumentalizing the inscriptions of trauma on my body, mind, and perception. i am transmuting these inscriptions onto objects and my interactions with these objects as an extension of self, which ultimately depends on the act of deconstructing myself and in many instances causing direct or implied harm to myself.
*as in: objects i have intentionally held onto when their ‘use-value’ was expended, for reasons of personal connection to the object and the history it endured. sentimentality is the appreciation beyond the use-value of an object. this appreciation is founded in emotional connections, relationships, memories, or symbols. honoring sentimentality is inherently anticapitalist.
i see self-mutilation as an empowering response to a system that perpetuates violence on and between bodies; taking it into my own control redirects that authority and subverts the act of injury into an act of poetry. i must be clear that i am not romanticizing the act of self-harm, but am rather accepting it as something that has been necessary to my resistance and recovery. instead of being bled out against my will, i am bleeding out on my own terms. this metaphor extends into the act of writing poetry, sharing revealing work, and splaying my most private guts for the universe to gaze upon. there is something profound in the act of survival as an abject being, and oftentimes survival necessitates some degree of self-immolation. i am a controlled burn in an overgrown forest of traumas. i am the matches that started the fire. i am the forest.
tangentially, but equally as important:
i am deeply connected to the Cast Iron Practice and Community as an alternative, experimental space. Cast Iron is my chosen family, Cast Iron is the reason i regained my voice. i believe:
Iron is elemental: it is the universe, it is the blood in our veins. to work with Iron is to connect to everything we have been forced to abandon under capitalism. to cast Iron is to reject alienation.
contemporary Iron Casting scenes are spaces that teach resilience, inner and collective strength, and the skills required to be adaptable, grounded, and proactive.
contemporary Iron Casting rejects the western art canon and superstructures that uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.
the Iron Casting Community cultivates innovation, curiosity, and experimentation– the very things under attack in an increasingly conservative geopolitical context.
transforming an industrial material with an exploitative and otherizing history into a space for reclamation, experimentation, and community-building is revolutionary. we have placed power back in the hands of the worker.
to cast Iron in the contemporary age is to be part of a revolutionary, resistant, empowered subculture.
my practice can be loosely typified as the (de/re)construction, abjectification, mourning, and Queerization of sentimental spaces and objects through a perspective informed by trauma, neurodivergence, and Queerness.
i am the act of nailing my bones to the wall
and stringing my arteries out
i am delicate i am soft
i am a fucking pansy
i am the blood in my gums
i am the last draw of a cigarette
i am the burning in my lungs
to say you know me is to ignore everything