HOME WITHIN
Home Within is a site specific, community engaged installation inspired by dark nights, Opelika’s neighborhoods, lit homes, and the hope and aspirations of our youth. The cutout drawings on each house were created by Opelika and Auburn middle school students who drew what they wanted to see in their dream homes. The drawings were curated by the artist, digitized, and then cut out of the sides of the steel in the tradition of piercework, magic lanterns or other proto-cinematic devices. The lights cycle on and off, creating a dynamic landscape of shifting light and shadow. The woven ceiling is a combination of industrial and fiber techniques fabricated strand by strand using a forge, bender, and welder by the artist and her assistants. The minimal shapes, woven steel, and flowing ceiling create a landscape and neighborhood that connects the domestic and industrial nature of the site. Traversing the space from start to end transforms the hallway into a passage of discovery, curiosity, and wonder. Home Within invites viewers to consider the stories, dreams, and aspirations that exist within our homes while exiting or entering Boxcar’s theater and event space.
Dream home drawings created by Auburn and Opelika middle school students thanks to art teachers Tiffany Ala, Sarah Rhodes, and Julie Speir.
Fabricated int he Sculpture Studio at Auburn University’s 3D Studio Art Building
Project Assistants: Audrey Caldwell and Basil Helms
Digital Assistant: Calum MacAnthony
Sponsored by: Verdant Fund Project Grant and Auburn University College of Liberal Arts Summer Research Grant
Implied Violence
Implied Violence is an ongoing series of cast iron and cast cotton sculptures reflecting the dichotomy of domination and submission through violent means from weapons of silencing, subduing, and control like ball gags, bull whips, and state laws. Each set captures the complexity and impotence of these tools to control a restless populace. Cotton holds the material capitalist desires to remake labor in pursuit of greater profits at the expense of our humanity while iron holds the industrial past and its conquests manifest in a fragile, hard form. Made in an attempt to expunge the artist’s frustrated desires for free inquiry and unfettered expression, the Implied Violence series will continue until a full forty have been completed.
A single act of breathing
Created during a residency at Satoko Ueno’s Uchiyama washi papermaking studio, the work was part of Branching Out, an exhibition at the Shiga Kogen Roman Museum with Manami Ishimura, highlighting Kijimadaira Village’s 200-year plan to restore a beech forest on former cattle ranch land. This small rural community is united by a vision to replant what once thrived. A Single Act of Breathing mirrors that fragility and care, serving as a meditation on our mutual reliance and a call to continue stewarding nature for future generations.
Using kozo grown in Satoko Ueno’s fields in Kijimadaira, the fiber was harvested, processed, and snow-bleached the season before the residency. During my time in residence, it was cooked, cleaned, and beaten into pulp with a Hollander beater. I formed sheets in the Western style, embedding wire between two wet sheets of pulp. These were partially dried with a vacuum and then adhered to a steel water dryer.
Once the paper was made, I sculpted it into columns, creasing and bending the sheets to evoke the texture and movement of an esophagus. The arteries were created by shaping wire and dipping it through kozo pulp suspended in water. After drying, the tips were coated with glue and iron, then encouraged to rust with a special “rust juice”. The column sheets were dragged through the residue of that rusting process to produce a bark-like surface, emphasizing the shared presence of iron in both human blood and the earth. The final work was assembled and installed on site at the museum using wire and magnets.
Her secret voice, if soundless then possibly visible, might work out of her terrible mouth like a vine, preening and sprung with flowers.
Her secret voice… represents often overlooked but impactful women’s labor through corroding doily forms, white women’s complicity, and the reliance of the American South on cotton to amass the nation’s wealth. The fiber in these sheets consists of raw cotton grown in Alabama, processed through laborious hand papermaking into large sheets. The floating rusted forms traipse across the paper, bright orange with iron dust and are impressed into the sheets from actual vintage doilies largely produced by women to beautify their homes. The doilies also look like floating cells or falling snowflakes, connecting to the change of the seasons and organic matter.
The cotton was gathered from discarded Auburn University soil science studies and holds the long, fraught history of the crop in America. Cotton drove our country’s wealth due to profiting off of slave labor in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is still used worldwide and is an essential cash crop and export. The corrosive rust tears away the integrity of the paper, which also naturally appears flesh-like and wrinkled akin to Caucasian skin. The title comes from Eudora Welty’s short story “Moon Lake” that is part of her series that takes place in Morgana, an imaginary, but quite real, small Mississippi town. The white female figures she describes hold space in our conflicting narratives of the past and its impact on the present, visible and invisible, terrible and beautiful, preening and sprung with flowers.
Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights is an ongoing series of castings made from doilies and rope. Combined and cast into iron, the once flexible fiber becomes frozen in its cast iron form. Delicate and thin, with the doilies appearing similar to leaves or flower heads, their forms evoke garden detritus or arteries delivering blood to an extremity. Dyed in shades of green and transfigured into iron, the works together become a dystopian garden. Combining women’s decorative craft with marine ropes and casting it into an industrial material creates a new representation of growth, foreign and familiar.