If you have not yet contemplated a shell, I encourage you to find one. Maybe go to a beach or a river and look down. Pick up a shell without thinking too much. Let its weight settle in your hand. Close your eyes. Trace the ridges, scoops and textures with your fingers. Listen to it, smell it. Care can be a very internal practice, even when it involves an exoskeleton.
Audio visual and installation. 2025.
Residual Echos explored relational processes through material transformation and state change using clay, film photography, and sound. This series was created while contemplating human/non-human care, rupture, and partial-recuperation at the Pocoapoco art Residency.
I started by practicing a daily walk to start to form relationship with place and began to notice exterior water nodes/connectors outside of homes. I worked with fragile, bone-dry clay pieces and placed them at these specific touch points during the walk. This practice became a meditation on the materials/resources that intertwine in their ubiquity and ephemerality – water, clay, bodies. What happens when something disappears, and what captures these relationships?
The clay pieces were left next to the water nodes for 2-3 days, during which some remained intact, others crumbled, and some disappeared entirely. The surviving pieces became the basis for cyanotype prints, as a way to ‘fire’ the clay pieces that would eventually dissolve.
The cyanotypes were displayed next to the remaining clay pieces at our final show, along with printed film photos. The work culminated in a performance where I amplified the sound of the clay pieces dissolving and rehydrating and created projections of video from my walk.
Residual Echoes. 2024. Performance, Clay, Photo, Cyanotype
Curation of group show at Prism Arts Space.
As we live together on a damaged planet, how do we practice repair. Still Possible centered on the question: As things fall apart, what can we repair? What do we let disintegrate and re-compost? How do we tend to what remains and imagine what could still emerge? Drawing from Donna Harraway’s notion of partial-recuperation, the artist and collectives in this show leaned into repair as it parallels and intertwines with self, each other and our ecosystems.
Artist featured:
Quinha Mukai Faria, Corrine Smith, Sierra Reading, Dylan Chapple, Katherine Rutter, Daisy Jaberi, Don Hankins, jo logu, Worm School, Black and Brown Farm Collective, and Will Pierce.
Worm School ( b. 2021) is an artist collective and reading group. Worms currently writhing in the compost pile are Ako Castuera, Ako Ibekwe, Iso Marcus, Rosie Brand, and Zena Segre.
Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble was a formative text for worm school, helping shape their practice as ‘earthworm symbionts’. Embracing Donna Haraway’s claim ‘thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers’. Worm school facilitates reading discussions alongside material exercises for thinking hands. These conversations reflect shared interests in craft practices and their entanglements with local ecologies, material relationships with place, alternate futures, and reimagined pasts.
Past discussions have been held online and at community spaces including Pitzer College and The Infinite School.
Touch Points is a collaboration with Archeologist and Artist Karin Dahl that explores the questions: How do we know a place? What materials define relationship with place? Touch Points follows the pace of relationship, with intentions to foster a longitudinal collaboration that cycles in iteration. The initial Touch Points project was an archeological and somatic dig that occurred while attending the Social Studies residency in Colusa, CA (2019). Areas of inquiry focused on understanding our somatic response to soil, as well as establishing connection with place through a collaborative sensory experience. Touch Points II ORB, involved exploring temporality, burring cylindrical clay orbs that contain messages from past, present, and future realities. Touch Points III: Things are Weirder Than We Think They Are, followed curated readingspaired with material practice and culminated in an elaborate dinner party.
What happens when your interviewer is non-verbal, non-human and geological?
Clay Interviews is a project that explores the slow reflections that occur in a clay-human dialogue. Each human interviewee is chosen because of a transitional life moment they are experiencing. They are facilitated to engage in an attentional practice - a reciprocal conversation with clay based on Martin Bobbers concept of ‘i - thou’ relationships.
Documentation shown from interviews with Marie Hoff and Chaitra Bangalore.
Confetti started as an intersectional queer art group to address community care. Confetti engaged in performances, music videos, conversations, pep talks and fundraisers. Confetti’s members were/are fluid. Core members included Jenny Yang, Iso Marcus, Jo Logu, and Jess Anthony. Projects include performance, installation, fundraising for local orgs, and Pep Talk!
