Sculpture/Installation
Grief Cave
Grief Cave is a (largely) textile mobile installation built entirely of recycled materials that holds space for people to process the things they are mourning.
It was born of a realization that the modern U.S. has a dearth of grief rituals. There are exceptions, such as sitting shiva, but these are few and far between, nowhere near ubiquitous, and usually specific to familial death. The last couple years have brought an ambient, layered grief into the lives of most people I know, and it felt as though almost none of us had the cultural tools to handle it.
Enter: caves. They’re full of hopeful contradictions - formed by erosion, they come into existence via the dissolution of something. When you refer to a cave what you’re really referring to is the absence of something, what’s not there anymore. Creation via destruction! An apt metaphor for grief.
Visitors are invited to bring small items representative of something they're processing. These contributions are worked into the body of the cave, so that each new iteration has more and more grief totems knit into the walls and stalactites/stalagmites. A calcification of a community’s grief into a space of comfort and growth.
This initial setup was a proof of concept, and a trial run for the North End neighborhood. Do you have a space that could hold another temporary iteration the Grief Cave? Get in touch.
Flux Factory Parade Floats
Over the years, I’ve created several absurd, playful “parade floats” out of recycled materials for nonprofit arts organization and community space Flux Factory. These mobile sculptures were built out of shopping carts, refrigerator boxes, dollies, old parachutes, upholstery scrap, and more. They were used for community events and projects such the annual Flux-a-Thon fundraiser, or "Hotel Wars", a series of interventions that responded to rezoning changes in Long Island City.
