Memento
Memento was installed in a former tobacco drying warehouse in Richmond, Virginia. Principles of alchemy guide this story. I crafted bowls of lead and placed them atop mounds of pulverized limestone, which contains the calcified remains of our evolutionary predecessors. In each I placed five organic elements that undergo radical change.
My back marks the center of this triptych, flanked by my left arm holding a cow’s vertebra and my right arm holding the charred remains of a protea plant, one of earth’s most ancient, which released its seeds in a California wildfire. Chiaroscuro suggests forms emerging through human, botanical, and faunal biologies.
I burned lodgepole pine cones onto silver gelatin paper to better understand catastrophic change as it occurs in the natural world. These explosions, formed in the dark, are a complete system of creation. Each produces its own light and casts its own shadow; the most basic elements needed to make a photograph.
I explore an alternative to carbon-based life with a replica of the human skull forged out of gallium—a metal with a melting point of eighty-five degrees. I placed the skull in the palm of my hand and changed its state of matter through my body temperature alone.
