2026
Medium: Reclaimed wire, worn T-shirt, exposed root, soil
Dimensions: 30″ x 41″ x 26″
Price / Status: $3200 USD — Available for sale
Exhibition History: None
Themes: Ecological frailty and resilience
Artist Statement
Refugia: Holdfast examines vulnerability at the intersection of transformation and collapse. Created from discarded materials—a work-worn shirt, wire hangers and cable found in my garden, a neighbor’s dislodged tree root from the curb after Hurricane Helene—this piece embodies the precarity of systems suspended between regeneration and failure.
The chrysalis form references metamorphosis as both promise and threat. In nature, transformation requires radical vulnerability: the dissolution of existing structures before new forms can emerge. We exist at such a threshold now. Our species must choose whether to recognize ourselves as participants within planetary ecosystems or continue accelerating toward conditions incompatible with human life.
The shirt I wore in my garden connects my body to the sculptural form, collapsing the false boundary between human and nature. We are not stewards standing apart from ecological systems—we are embedded within them, subject to the same cycles of growth, decay, and renewal that govern all living things. The oxidized fabric and rusted wire make visible what we desperately try to ignore: our bodies, like our structures, are temporary assemblages that will return to the earth.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton that followed a few weeks later, revealed how urgently we misunderstand our relationship to natural systems. In response to flooding, neighbors removed healthy trees that had survived the storms—trading proven resilience for the illusion of control, destroying wildlife habitat in a misguided attempt to protect human habitations. Threshold holds this moment: the chrysalis suspended, waiting, asking whether what emerges will be adaptation or extinction.
This work is a test piece for Refugia: Holdfast, a larger installation exploring cyclical transformation through performance, sculpture, and material witness.
Process Documentation
The embedded video documents the complete making cycle: wearing the shirt in the garden while discovering materials, constructing the wire armature, hand-stitching the fabric skin onto the form, treating it with salt and vinegar to accelerate oxidation, placing it in a bag with garden soil and leaves, and finally unveiling the transformed piece. This documentation makes visible the labor of transformation and the material’s journey from domestic object to sculptural witness.