Every textile is a ghost, an echo of the way a body moved through space once, performing a scored movement passed down generationally, often through a matrilineage. My work is an attempt to center and reify these hauntings in order to encounter the queer eroticisms of death, grief, and loss.
Floating gently in unspun sheets nailed to a wall in effigy of either the crucifix or entomological collection and preservation, the material reality of silk enmeshes ideas of the queer eroticism of death and dying with themes of obsession, repetition, ritual, and loss. These sheets of silk, or mawata, are the unbound cocoons of a silkworm allowed to survive for use as breeding stock; rather than being boiled and reeled, these imperfect cocoons are stretched over a frame and used for ‘raw silk’ production, leaving a physio-temporal record of transformation, and a brief glint of life in defiance of death.
Coated in chlorophyll, a fugitive pigment, the images imbued on these sheets of silk will fade when exposed to ambient light, changing, and “dying” over the course of an exhibition. Alternatively, the work is spun into yarn, encountering a separate sort of performative death ritual: all of the initial information encoded in the image-object remains but has been materially recontextualized to the point of unrecognizability. Witnessing the ambient fading makes viewers and collectors complicit and implicit in the destruction of the work; kept in darkness, the work would be preserved. Through the exchange of display and witness, the work beseeches a viewer to confront the inevitability of death and rot as neutrality, rather than an eldritch impossibility to be celebrated or feared.
Similarly attempting to reify and make present the ambient phenomena by which we are perennially haunted are the cyanotype works. Serving as ephemeral relics of a performance, the works are created by laying a textile coated in photosensitive cyanotype chemistry on snow. By pressing a part of my body onto the surface, a reaction is initiated: the snow begins to melt in response to the heat of my body, and the now liquid water begins to process and fix the cyanotype, slowly forming a ghostly image record of my body and its processes in the cold.
Through a reductive, excavatory process of thinking and iterative creation, I seek to discover which elements are strictly necessary for the work and include only those elements which the work mandates in order to exist. The product of these relentless excavations, the quiet, elegiac pseudo performances of destruction that remain obsessively beg the question, through melt, fading, and spinning: When all of this is over, what remains?