This installation consists of three elements. The first is a full body suit encrusted with Wolf Lichen gathered from highway shoulders in the deserts of Central Oregon. The second is a video recording of the artist performing in the lichen suit. The third is a human silhouette constructed from juniper branches, the lichen’s original host. These three companion objects create an origin story for a creature that is neither human nor plant, a creature that blurs the border between the animate and inanimate.

What if your self was a soft mass of permeable features, liquid-like, and constantly becoming entangled with other people and beings? Our perception of a whole self is constantly thrown into question by the presence and influence of others, and our tendency to fold and shape in response to our surroundings. This piece is an inquisition into the relationships people have with themselves and others, and uses the body’s permeability to water as a way to examine the permeability of the individual mind.

or:

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video. 6:07 (2019)

In collaboration with Kayla Elrod and Rik Burns, this piece examines the value and nature of real and synthetic expressions of mourning, celebration, and loss as they are embodied by flowers.

This installation is houses a series of explorations surrounding human-plant relationships. Three videos play that document confrontations with the more unexpected properties of plant-consumption: bitterness, toxicity, and histamine content. Two CRT monitors sit at either end of a table with a clear top. The small cameras mounted beneath the table send the activity from the tabletop to the monitors. In this way, the table becomes the stage for viewers to interact with the leaves of English Yew plants gathered from the area surrounding the Koppelman Gallery in Medford, MA where this piece was exhibited. The viewers were invited to interact in any way that they chose with the leaves, which house hundreds of lethal doses of taxine compounds but pose little threat if not consumed. The table also houses small questionnaires which ask viewers to observe their surroundings and identify themselves from various investigative standpoints.

photo credit: Laura Beth Reese

(Sample questionnaire [one of four])

1. Have you seen this plant before?

2. Do you think you could pick it out of a lineup?

3. Are you more of a:

_ witch

_ scientist

_ animal

_ lost person

_ exhibitionist ocasual observer o bystander

_ survivor

_ cook

_ explorer

_ child age 0-12?

4. Would you rather be something else?

5. Would you call poison control just to tell them how your morning was going?

6. if you were a dog, what could you get away with?

7. Do you prefer hiding or being seen?

8. Do plants ever get in your way?

9. Do you like yourself, or nature more?

10. Would you notice if your heart started to beat slightly slower?

11. Do you worry

other people think that you’re following them?

12. What would you risk to avoid

routine?

This piece is part of a series of explorations that probe at the nature of human-plant relationships, and specifically chronicles interactions with English Yew berries. The sweet, edible arils cloak seeds that can prove lethal if ingested. In this piece, the body becomes the primary investigator of biological properties that can determine survival or death.

video 7:15

This piece is part of a series of explorations that probe at the nature of human-plant relationships, and specifically chronicles interactions with stinging nettles, which inject abrasive histamines into human skin on contact.

video 6:25

This piece is part of a series of explorations that probe at the nature of human-plant relationships, and specifically chronicles interactions with dandelions, which are as bitter as they are ubiquitous. Their bitterness becomes the trait which initiates a human reaction, even as delight and curiosity collide with disgust.

Interior[]Sample

video 5:46

Project Statement: This piece is an experimental taxonomy I express through video performance paired with poetry, sound and text to breathe life into the plants captured in the patterns of the wallpaper at 20, Webster Court. I am interested in the moment in which plants become abstractions as they are removed from where they grow naturally and transformed into wallpaper designs and botanical subjects. In my performance I evoke the violence inherent in this removal and categorization. The audio and poetic elements of the piece expand on the histories of each plant depicted (often ambiguously) on the wallpaper. What results is a reanimation of the dead, distilled, and repeated patterns of plant-life into a ghostly museum of flora that takes the viewer and listener through various rooms of the house.

Sympathetic reception poses two questions: how do we form an intimate connection with nature, and when the idea of nature fails us (because can not exclude ourselves from the natural world) how do we form an intimate connection with our surroundings? This piece examines these questions through rituals that attempt to access this intimacy at whatever cost.

video 15:19 (2018)

The real and imagined borders between wild and urban spaces shape our experience of the natural world. eraser explores these borders through notions of belonging and the cathartic erasure of self through the experience of nature. Here the urge to transform a natural space into an inhabitable domestic sphere wars with the desire to vanish into a landscape, and remove all trace of ever having walked its paths.

video. 2:06. (2017)

In collaboration with Signe Raunkjaer-Holm

In interaction (conflation), sameness and difference collide as two figures undertake the labor of blending material information in the form of dead skin. As these materials transform the unwanted into an ethereal landscape, their origins are lost and they become homogenous. We express a wish for intimacy and self-revelation while being aware of the separation between our bodies, and the impossibility of our own ability to actually merge. 

video. 1:15. 2017.

Coywolf–two approaches is a performance whose rules are derived from instructions from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources on how to interact with coyote-wolf hybrids that have spread throughout the Northeastern United States. This performance is the result of these instructions being enacted as accurately and inaccurately as possible in turn. The project aims to break down the mechanics of human/animal interaction.

video. 2:41. (2017).

scratch interrogates the relationship between self-reliance and self-care. This piece is a performed ritual that was motivated my my isolation in a new place. When I found an unknown rash on my body, I realized I was thousands of miles away from anyone I knew well enough to ask for help treating places on my body that I couldn’t reach myself. Cycles of soothing and irritation closely entwine each other in this two-channel piece.

video. 7:14 (2016)

This project maps the struggle of rolling a 7’ by 7’ square wooden frame, end-over-end, from the top of a mountain back into a town. By taking this rectilinear form into the wilderness, I reference the gridding of public spaces, both wild and urban. The piece is a map that charts the ritual removal of a foreign object from a wilderness setting.

video. 3:30. (2016)

In collaboration with Kayla Elrod

map: unaided was spurred by inquiry into the limitations of my body. This project maps the places on my body that I can reach with my tongue, and highlights the reliance on others to maintain and access my body. The sound component of this piece, designed by my collaborator Kayla Elrod, links body and land with both material and sound. Each sound is made by the human body in nature, creating a relationship between the exploration of indoor and outdoor spaces.

How to Measure Obsession was a performance which took place over the course of the day in which I had to perform my daily activities while burdened by 200 pounds of clay that was braided into my hair. I pushed this weight on a cart which restricted my movements only to wheelchair accessible places. This project delves into the weight (physical and psychological) of an obsession, and also the weight that beauty standards and body maintenance hold for men and women. This piece was an exercise in planned failure.