About Midden

The body as an object—objectified, deconstructed, fetishized, weathered, worn, parsed, and reconstructed—is a living document. Experience is inscribed into flesh. DNA carries histories: inherited limitations and gifts, trauma and resilience, passed quietly from one lifetime to the next.

I think of bodies as load-bearing architecture: as scaffolding, vessels, and portals. Since having my son, I have been trying to understand my own body in space and in time—not only as a singular form, but as a passageway both forward into the future and backward into the past. Research in the field of epigenetics suggests that our bodies do not begin with us; within our cells, we carry the physical imprint of our ancestors and the material consequences of their lived experiences.

At the pace of contemporary life, my attention fractures. There are the intimate, quiet micro-moments of family; the meso-moments of daily labor and community; and the macro-moments of global and political upheaval. These layers converge and compete, producing a dizzying simultaneity—horror and beauty, love and terror, death and endurance. I experience the body as fragmented, buffeted, yet still required to hold.

In this exhibition, the gallery becomes a terrain where bodies operate simultaneously as vessels, ruins, altars, and blueprints. I draw from the amalgamated stories I grew up with, translating them into fever-dream representations rather than fixed narratives. The sculptural forms resist resolution; instead, they mark thresholds—sites of erasure, accumulation, and transformation—where the body insists on being both fragile and load-bearing, personal and collective, present and ancestral.