When God had made The Man,
he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over.
Then after that some angels got jealous
and chopped him into millions of pieces,
but he still glittered and hummed.
So they beat him down to nothing but sparks.
but each little spark had a shine and a song.
So they covered each one over with mud.
And the lonesomeness in the sparks
made them hunt for one another,
but the mud is deaf and dumb.
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
In this body of work, I use boxes, packing peanuts, and light to represent significant points in my experience. The recognizable forms, forced into uniformity through the casting process, allow the materials to become the content. I employ a range of media (wax, rubber, silk, steel, iron, porcelain, cotton, rubber, wool, beeswax, lard) to convey hard, soft, pliable, stiff, organic, inorganic, fragile, and strong, and display them in combinations that reflect my experience physically, intellectually, and emotionally. The box, as a single geometric container, suggests the body/mind’s control, while the peanut, as an accessible organic form with associations of protection, padding, insulation, and abundance, describes the body/mind’s literal and figurative contents. The illumination suggests the presence of the immaterial self, which the peanuts and box function to either reveal or obscure.