Flesh & Form (2023-2024)
In an existence of enduring somatic threat, my conception of self formed around the primacy of pain. Body is and always has been flesh under threat. Agender, asexual, simply flesh in a particular structural arrangement of matter operating in feedback loops in dynamic interchange with the flesh of nature.
I refigure body as matter making and unmaking itself: continually organizing, correcting, and battling itself as it decays, withers, degenerates, repairs, fights, assembles, and stabilizes in a constant fight against compounding systemic faults. Contending matter as agential and in constant flux and interchange, and I engage flesh as and of nature, mediating the vitality of materials through my perceptual and somatic intuition. I print in response to painted, gestural activity, and paint or draw in reaction to printed or transferred marks, weaving between intention and incidence. Indirect methods provide imagistic, textural, and structural bases that make paint beholden to the materiality of my surface and layers.
I magnify the vitality of my materials evident in the minute scale of material activity captured when paint dries by evaporation on smooth, minimally or non-absorbent surfaces. Pigments coagulate, disperse, and repel in movements managed and unleashed, mediated through gesture, or entirely subject to independent arrangement. The substrate becomes equally the stage and sole record of this studio alchemy, a dance of suspended particulates, frozen, space and arrangement set by the pace of evaporation.
Interface and interference—I photograph the substrate to form a library of gesture which I subsequently re-impose onto my paintings through toner-based image transfer and relief printing. Fundamentally, that gesture is of recurrent and reflexive activity. Recurrent as mimicry across nature — fractals morphologically traced as from the geological to the topographical through the arboreal, into mycelium, the cellular, our neural connectome —and as mimicry across scale from micro to and through macrocosms. Reflexive as matter in interchange and equivalence—arranged, arranging, being arranged by, reactively rearranging. The material activity reflects my conception of the body as being in constant flux and instability, driven by instinct to fight the ruination of the time that passes through it.
My humanity, my self, first and foremost exists in my corporeality, my faulty matter. Thus, “Tumulus” translates my perception of existence, emergent from early diagnosis and fear that raised me to locate being in vital flesh. Granting no individual soul or character, the body is of a world, and the world is of a body. The flesh of nature, equivalent to the flesh of the body, is a particular arrangement of matter held in the constant state of becoming and unbecoming.