This work approaches questions of corporeality through sculpture, research, and writing, imagining a constant state of becoming with material flows, chemical/environment, and human/nonhuman others. In consideration of nonlinear body-making/biohacking, I ask how a study of materiality itself can provide a more thorough account of the ontologically agile body – one that is not inert or individually discrete but morphing and entangled. I consider transient molecules, material surroundings, and quorum sensing, making studio work around the site of the particle, cocoon, and microbiome/chemical.
Inspired by the particulate versatility of unfired clay as a material that can be reformed while retaining memory of past forms, I focus on a primarily ontological question: how does this dynamic entanglement at the unit of materiality contribute to the morphing potential of the nonindividual body?
In this project, I ask how the nonlinear morphing of body-making may be not be something the body is simply put through in service of an image formed exclusively in the mind, but rather that this flexing potentiality – an ontological agility, at its core – may also be an attribute of the materiality of the body itself. If material units are much more active, agential and entangled than previously allowed for, what does this mean for the stuff of the body?
