Orbit (2025-)
Lava as arbor and landscape as space draw the body beyond microcosms of plant life, through topology, and into Orbit. Transposing my aberrant body—defined by Classical Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome’s faulty collagen and structural instability—into ecological distress, I meld the fissures and cascades of lava and tissue, cavern and orifice, to trace inescapable rupture and innate fault lines across scales.
Basaltic pāhoehoe lava traverses the volcanic plane in a soft, rope-like bloat of webbed connectivity, where internal orange vitality gradates from the ground up towards its ashen topology, cooled into a billowing sheen of undulations, softly wrinkling across a snaking cascade. The magmatic perfusion of a’a comes in the cracks and fissures, hard lines, rivers of contrast, that expose the molten interior that lies between fragmented islands of darkness, shards of rapidly cooled lava. While Pāhoehoe’s low-viscosity formation mimics the slithering intertwines of arbor roots and undulating folds of soft flesh and organs, the fissured veins of internal vitality that escape between the jagged clinker of basaltic a’a lava invoke the chaos of entropy and cosmic dispersal.
Seeking Gaia in the flux of volcanic rivers where layers of lava cover planes of once-molten volcanic rock, Orbit interrogates the layered escarpments of jagged cliffs besieged by erosion. Just as muscles atrophy and bodies degrade, in a slow careen into topographical oblivion, rocky bluffs wear from proud convexity into thin, tenuous precipices that tumble down slipstreams of malleable clay.
Microscopic veins of coagulation and fissure emerge through experimental processes of material fragmentation and corrosion. Printing plates laser-engraved and hand-cut with imagery of wrinkling scar tissue, cEDS SHG microscopy, lava, past paintings, and embracing the sharp edges and pearlescence of experimental layerings of acrylic crackle paste, I invoke the fragmentation between molten and hardened lava. Rivers of magma become veins of entropy, and their ventricular glow becomes a pulsing lifeblood.
Making caves of bony catacombs and fleshy rock, Orbit transcends the mammalian. Layering paint and printed forms from the inside out like strata of body and earth, paintings are independent ecosystems, treated as alive and granted agency. In an evolution through the grotesque, the body is overtaken by, and becomes wholly subject to, land and ecology.
