I destroy and transfigure salvage from the studio and other maker spaces—scrap metal, shed hair, worn-out wheels, dried pallets, etc.—into surrogate selves, through which I can enact and understand dissonant bodily desires. I seal them in a fragile medium to float and flaunt. I build them steel bones with which to guard and puncture. I sew them under thin, colorful threads to cradle and repress. The thread represents how we are bound by the logic of value. Fear of worthlessness manifests as thousands of soft lacerations that cause us to shrink and fold in on ourselves; to resist by becoming rigid and inflexible; to derive comfort from suffocating. Yet this fear of lack is the root of greed, just as insecurity produces pride.
Preciousness and worthlessness, destruction and transfiguration, accident and intention, means and ends, etc. become simultaneous when fully engaged with material. Words dissolve into an unbroken stream of sensory input. Making helps us unlearn the rationality of separation that secondhand language imposes on our experience of reality.
I am making my own freedom.