Embedded Files
Media Arts & Sciences major, Sociology minor
My work draws attention to everyday objects and phenomena gone unnoticed, referencing themes of intergenerational memory and care. Through careful considerations of materiality and structure, I bridge past and present.
Working across photography, moving image, and sculpture, I create delicate objects characterized by dimension and movement. These works serve as physical and conceptual pieces through which the weight of the past can be felt in the fragility of the present. Across my work, I emphasize the perpetuity of memory as an impression rather than a strict continuity.
My ability to see beauty and value in the details of the world around me plays a central role in my practice. My works are visual reflections on the traces we leave behind, the quiet remnants of memory and experience that persist even when we forget them.
A Silkworm
A Silkworm
acrylic on tracing paper and mulberry paper, cyanotype on mulberry paper, single channel video
Jewett Art Gallery
As a child, out at dinner with my family, I remember noticing a mischievous glimmer in my grandfather’s expression. “Let me show you how to grow the silkworm,” he said with a smile.
Carefully, he demonstrated: holding a wrapped straw pointed straight up, he gently crushed the wrapper down its length. He then laid the crumpled paper on the table. Enraptured, my brother and I watched as he used the now-unwrapped straw to drop water onto the wrinkled bit of paper. Slowly at first, then more quickly, the wrapper began to grow and expand, its once-squashed form lengthening and smoothing until the paper itself curled to resemble a live silkworm.
This memory, alongside the dynamism of compression and expansion, plays a central role in “A Silkworm.” Honoring the most forgettable of objects — not the straw itself, but its wrapper — I place archival imagery onto an object with hidden potential for joy or memory. This imposition invites the viewer to look more closely, reframing this scrap of everyday life as an object of subtle curiosity.
I use the visual language of cyanotypes to allude to that photographic development process, playing with varying shades of cyan and exposure time to convey how fixed a memory is held within a person’s mind. In selecting imagery, I focused on photographs of quiet “in between,” the smaller moments of contentment that make up the bulk of our lives.
Page updated
Report abuse