Put a Pin In It, 2025, Hand-printed reliefs on textile, pigment, mixed media, Installation view with artist
Jennifer Leigh Harrison
Artist Statement
My current work is involved in a practice I call archival protest. I take documented evidence of substantiated injustices and translate them into visual fields that are labor intensive and often monumental in scale. Drawing from real records, histories, losses, systems of human and ecological harm, or extraction, I materially reconstitute evidence through labor and repetition, where the archive is not separate from the body, nor is harm evenly distributed. Materials are also intentional, carrying histories of extraction, use, transformation and previous states. My body as one subject of the feminine also becomes a political location and instrument of movement and transformation.
Our bodies, like the earth, are intertwined, and so my work brings both narratives to surface through symbolism, gesture and archival material. Abstraction positions grief and memorial in a frame of unscripted witnessing where a viewer confronts their own inner questioning with the subject. Hand-pinning 4,970 flowers, a ceiling to floor textile of 22,000 hand-printed relief prints in a migratory pattern, or thousands of forms carved from torched beeswax and pigment enumerate documents otherwise lost in the datasphere. These are some of the ways I viscerally protest the state of the world and our place in it.