I am interested in the relationship between life, death, and the human body and its grotesque and beautiful qualities. By abstracting and morphing bodily forms, I create a sense of discomfort and familiarity for my audience; they are able to make connections with the work by relating it to their own bodies. I create in an effort to answer questions about the fragility and complexities of life and death by confronting people with the delicate and impermanent nature of their own lives.
Through my thesis work, I explore the effects of being faced with the realization of one's own mortality. My work explores the limitations of flesh and anxieties about the body’s inevitable decay that I have experienced and witnessed in others. By reflecting and navigating through my experiences with loss and the changes that have occurred because of them, I convey my frustrations with the fact that people lack control over their bodies in certain situations like aging, incurable illness, and injury. With this piece I have created distance between the sculpted ‘body’ and viewers so that they are only witnesses to the violent treatment and pain the body is undergoing, they are unable to help or prevent what is happening. This disconnect allows for a hospital-like experience as viewers and the sculpture begin to develop a visitor, patient relationship. I want to create a situation similar to peeking behind a hospital room curtain, being enticed by curiosity, only to get a startling view of the realities of life and death. We are made to realize our own inevitable decay, bound by the limitations of flesh.
