vital; vessel.
Drawing on a ‘totem’ as a symbolic and physical embodiment of selfhood, I view the body as my totemic self-portrait. My work, "Vital; Vessel.," examines the body’s visceral interior as a site of memory, transformation, and materiality. Years ago, I created small visceral maquettes from paint skins, waxed thread, bobby pins, acrylic nails, and other discarded beauty products and objects–fragments of materials that, much like the body, carry traces of lived experience. After participating in a soft sculpture workshop last fall, I returned to this practice, now inspired by The Five Viscera in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The Five Viscera–the liver, heart, spleen, lung, and kidney—represent an interconnected system where the internal and external coalesce. In my work, these five organs appear as suspended sculptural forms, intentionally balanced within a golden oval frame, reflecting the harmony and equilibrium essential to body and self. I meticulously manipulated the material into a dermis-like casing by soaking the stuffed fabric and fibers in beeswax. By meticulously hand-sculpting, stretching, stitching, stuffing, and felting each form, I blur the boundary between structure and fragility–resilience and decay. Suspended in this delicate balance, these visceral fragments are my totemic manifestations of selfhood.
I've incorporated three works on the wall that I reflected upon while making "Vital; Vessel."
Two of these were experimental paintings I created during my undergraduate courses at FAU. These two ovoids, "Tendon" and "Stew," are immersed in various paints and mediums on basswood rounds. I rediscovered them while developing "Vital; Vessel." The piece "Meat Flap" in the ornate oval frame marked one of my initial ventures into experimental soft sculpture. The beeswax helps the paint skin maintain its shape, while the felted wool provides a nice, raw, textural contrast to the synthetic, plastic quality of the paint. Although this work remains two-dimensional, it sculpturally refers to my pieces "Tendon" and "Stew" in this ovoid shape and their visceral nature.