Mended Hides
2023

Art and its materiality are in an increasingly unique position to inform our self-hood—altering our present, future, and even past. Taking a look back on my upbringing in rural Iowa, I regularly use materials and motifs familiar to me. At an early age, I had been introduced to the slaughtering process and death that has left a lasting impact. Yet, this existential fear ran parallel to the serenity of the repetitive and rhythmic patchwork of cornfields that I called home. Likewise, my work aims to confront my existential anxiety and trauma while also celebrating the positive qualities of human limited-ness through themes of livestock and its byproducts that evoke mortality.

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I implement handwoven animal fibers and the hides of livestock into my creative practice to also highlight the exhaustive and repetitive, yet cathartic actions involved in craft processes. Greatly informed by the works of Ana Mendieta, Candice Lin, Janine Antoni, and Lin Tianmiao, I want to demonstrate a sensory experience—the way we touch, feel, and the way we come to understand and relate—by exploring careful and rhythmic repetition using my own body as an instrument. By using hides in my art, the work becomes a relic of what was once there but is no longer present—blurring the line between sculpture and performance. In a way, the mended cowhide becomes a portrait.

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As I continue to investigate art objects and textiles, I want to demonstrate a metaphorical yet literal translation from “world to word” when spinning animal fibers into looping lengths of yarn and mending the hides of livestock, giving these transient points of cognizance a necessary permanence.

By using hides as relics of ritualistic actions and my own body as an instrument in my artistic practice, my art invites viewers to a sensory experience that blur the lines between sculpture and performance—highlighting trauma and violence acted upon the bodies of both human and non-human participants. I am able to examine the craft process in relationship with the feminine, historically regulated domestic task with a sort of playful attitude. This active engagement demonstrates the absurdity and immobility I feel as both a woman confined by these traditional acts of endurance and the reverence for our limitations that allows lived experiences that realizes sensations.