Residency June 2022 Riachuelo

Making Things in the Dark

This place is a healing space. You can feel it as soon as you walk on the property. It’s made with love and graft. The energy here is peaceful, and every day I wake up feeling something I haven’t in a long while, peace. It’s quiet, inspired, and surrounded by nature, birds, bugs, and the stream that runs through the property. It’s slower here, and I think that I need that. I am unplugged from a busy world; this is precisely the point. 

My intention here at Riachuelo was to pick up some work from the past. Casting forms from latex bladders that I had sewn or combining some of the materials and casting both previously made materials in combination with new latex. That isn’t lost, although as I’m reminded, I’m not that person anymore. I always work in the present, so my expectations of doing work that I had created before would never happen. 

 I am searching for the language, texture, shape, volume, color, density, and something I can’t articulate with words. Something intrinsically linked with the emotive and physical intellect of expressing complexity; what I sense around me, and within. It’s the search for the imperfect, intricate, dynamic, and invisible/visible. It’s a sensitivity to material and accepting ugly, damaged, flawed objects. It’s not about making the perfect sculpture. I don’t think I know what that is anyway. Still, it’s about creating a form that resonates with trauma and healing, imperfection and disorder. 

After spending a couple of days fumbling through construction and casting, I’m starting to stop myself from judging everything that I make. I’m making these vessels from recycled artwork that I made before; I am casting the inside without being able to see what I get. I think this is ok. I want to make new form, and I would be bored if I made something predictable. It’s not easy to let go of control; although decisions are to be made, aesthetic and meaning are phenomenological choices. What I mean by that is the qualities of the work have to resonate on the emotional, intellectual and physical level to hit the sense of what ‘it’ is in this moment. Challenging, but it also satiates my desire to think and engage.