The Orange Tree Exists

Detail

Detail

Somatic Topography

This work explores the collapse of the boundary between human consciousness and the geological earth. By shattering the traditional, passive pictorial plane of landscape painting, I treat the canvas not as a flat window onto nature, but as a site of physical, elemental rupture. Through a process of excavation and reconstruction, the flat surface is torn open to reveal a pressurized, visceral realm where the human form does not merely exist in the landscape, but actually is the landscape.

An old landscape I painted serves as a historical anchor along the perimeter, a quiet border that is violently compromised by an eruption of raw matter. Using black tourmaline, I construct a dense, light-absorbing topography that evokes the ancient, pressurized voids of the earth. From this primeval field, a fragmented human figure emerges. The heavy torso stands in stark opposition to the clear head, allowing light to pass through the seat of intellect and consciousness, contrasting the dense opacity of the body.

The suspension of the anatomy and the urgent gesture of the hands breaking through the lower register evoke both emergence and creation. This work rejects the notion that humanity is a mere observer of the environment. By literalizing the physical weight of mineral matter, the artwork positions the human body as an extension of the earth itself, an artifact of the Anthropocene emerging from a state of unraveling.

Latency

This sculpture stages a condition of containment rather than an act of display. A dense, mineralized form has organized itself around an internal presence of conditional visibility.

The surrounding mass suggests a structure that preserves through pressure and restriction. Rather than resolving into narrative or transformation, the work remains in a state of latency, where energy is stored, access constrained, and meaning held in abeyance. The form suggests an unearthing of deep-seated memory, or the slow, pressurized emergence of light from within darkness and an invitation to peer into a void without fully entering it.

Condition of Stone

In a state of suspension, two hands hold a translucent mass between them. One hand is dark and weight-bearing, the other the opposite, while a surrounding structure suggests fracture, sediment, and mineral accretion unfolding across deep time. I was interested in what happens when something that appears provisional and delicate is pressed into relation with materials that imply permanence and geological scale. The wall is not a backdrop but a pressure field, its crystalline cavity hinting at slow formation rather than event. A concealed light intermittently activates that interior, registering change beyond immediate perception. Intentionally unresolved, the hands neither release nor dominate. Instead, they hold a tension where something is neither shielded from the stone nor overwhelmed by it, but gradually implicated in its slow, governing force.

Detail

Detail