These nests reflect a time when both the circumstances of the pandemic and a back injury kept me almost entirely isolated in my apartment. My relationship with home completely changed; feeling at once supported and constricted as my whole world shrank within its confines. The nests symbolize my struggle between my desperate desire to connect and relieve my loneliness with my need to feel safe and avoid pain.
Each nest is a sanctuary with its most beautiful, precious aspect hidden from view and shielded from harm. Each nest focuses on a single conflict or experience that I wrestled with over this period of two years. Held together entirely by tension, they are objects that are never truly at rest.
Rising (assembled sculpture, 2021)
Have you ever dreamt that you were drowning? You fight and kick and claw your way up, desperately trying to reach the surface before you run out of air. But your control over your limbs dims and dwindles, until you can’t fight anymore, and it feels as though you are letting yourself slip away. Sometimes the dream ends badly, and you jerk awake, gasping. But sometimes when you cease struggling, you are buoyed upwards, and you cut through the surface gently, and you can breathe again.
Burnout (assembled sculpture, 2022)
Over lockdown, I had been robbed of so many of my pleasures, but what had been handed back to me was supposed to be time. But instead of it being a period of great artistic growth, I found myself trapped in a cycle of having short bursts of creative output, followed rapidly by long periods with no energy or focus, sinking into a stupor, and then stretches of feeling ashamed of wasting my precious, precious time.
Grief (assembled sculpture, 2023)
Grief without comfort or the rituals of mourning has no conclusion. The lockdowns were punctuated by the passing of four people that I cared deeply about. These losses resonated as a slow, mournful dirge, each one tolling in succession, bookended by two deaths that were tragically premature. Each time I was left a little more bare; a little more fragile. With this piece I wanted to bring to mind the wreckage left behind after a fire tears through a home.