2026
Medium: Roving wool, reclaimed thread, river stones, driftwood
Dimensions: 63″ × 39″ x 10”
Price / Status: $2500 USD — Available for sale
Exhibition History: None
familiarity / alienation
cradle / cage
repulsed and compelled to touch
enmeshment / estrangement
a shoebox of silkworm cocoons
and the mummified corpses that had emerged in the dark,
Secrets,
the strange normalcy of it all
opened seed pods beside sterile glassware
in rooms where we weren’t allowed to play
pods that trap and slowly consume
or shelter and transform
body / object
beige maternal figures
internal / external
hidden things held heavy in the body
safety, or festering
inheritance
protection / control
being silenced
comfort / trap
concealed / embraced
Artist Statement:
My work is a process of making meaning from myth and memory. Inheritance explores this through the lens of familial legacy and the tension between intimacy and enmeshment.
This suspended sculptural vessel employs river stone, driftwood, felted wool, and reclaimed thread to examine the ways memory impresses itself upon both bodies and materials. The ambiguous organic forms resist a single reading, simultaneously suggesting seed pods, cocoons, swaddled bodies, or carnivorous plants—natural yet subtly unfamiliar, both incubator and predator. These shifting associations reflect the instability of childhood memory, where care and harm, familiarity and alienation, become intermingled, permanently shaping how we experience the world and form relationships. Rather than presenting memory as a coherent narrative, the work embraces fragmentation, allowing sensation and material to carry meaning where language falls short.
My materials are memory made tangible. Wool—central to my Boer lineage—transforms under friction and force into felt, an irreversible change that mirrors the ways experience reshapes us. Reclaimed thread, salvaged cord, river stone, and driftwood have each lived other lives before entering the work, carrying the marks of weathering, use, and time. Their histories become inseparable from my own, suggesting that memory is impressed upon material as much as it is carried within the body. Felting and stitching become acts of accumulation and repair, compressing loose fibers into forms that, like memory itself, are layered, altered, and permanent.
Hidden things are only half revealed, like memories from a time before we had language. The work holds the strange mythology of childhood: silkworm cocoons, seed pods in rooms where we weren’t allowed to play, beige maternal figures, and forms that seem to shelter or consume. These fragments speak to the ways family systems normalize what is hidden, inherited, or left unresolved, embedding those experiences in the body long before they can be articulated.
The installation incorporates a spoken-word text written in fragments, like childhood memory: not narrative, but sensed. Moving through association rather than chronology, it allows contradictory experiences to exist simultaneously. Inheritance asks what we carry from those who came before us, what continues to shape us beneath conscious awareness, and whether what is inherited can be transformed without being erased.