March/Mars
Dozens of white eggs sit waiting on the church’s ledge, arranged in quiet order.
Almost identical, they present themselves devotionally, hidden in plain sight. They look familiar. Their associated symbolism of fertility, rejuvenation, and rebirth is, for most, deeply rooted. Roundly shaped, without beginning or end, they embrace an infinite form, as their repetition evokes habit and the rhythm of a deadening routine.
I’m interested in engaging with the tenderness of overlooked places. When I enter a space, I like to observe, play around, and find out what’s behind each closed door. Sometimes, I press some buttons, flip a switch, look under the benches, and peek through the cracks. I’m searching for the nooks and crannies as I try to understand how a place works, what it holds, what it needs, and if it’s trying to tell me something.
Through multimedia installations and sculptures, I respond to that encounter. What I make is a gesture to our meeting. Subtle and responsive, a tribute to forgotten places. Latex and plaster are materials I return to. They’re soft, pliable, fluid and brittle, yet solidified and stern; they mirror the transformative qualities of the places themselves and the fragments of our lives meeting.
This quality of attentiveness, to material, to place, to encounter, is inseparable from who I am as an artist-educator. The places I move through and the objects I encounter, I tend to read as enablers of learning and connection, asking how they facilitate an encounter, what they make possible between people and their environments. The eggs in the church are no different. They are a distillation of that same inquiry, quietly asking what it takes to make someone stop, look, and stay with something a little longer than they planned.
