Things fitting together in certain ways, outside of me (2022)
Materials: cotton linter pulp, 40” x 60”
White, textured, various shaped sculptures arranged flush on a wall.
The title Things fitting together in certain ways, outside of me comes from Mel Baggs Cultural Commentary: Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours. Baggs' text “scales the cliffs of language” and paints a rich and vivid narrative describing their experience of being neurodivergent.
Anchored in this text, the work explores a process of collecting. Carried out through basic forms, the collection of shapes are placed together in no particular order. The work is silent in its content, using only cotton linters in its materials; it holds no hidden archive. It explores exchanges that happen in the absence of language, speech, thought or comprehension. Questioning structures that ask us to be “fluent” in something; fluency as a form of ownership. It asks the questions: “how do you depart from the urge towards fluency? How do you exist within a container of pulp or mush and move through it without the aim to make profound sense of it, but rather to see it all around you, all at once?”