Thesis

My recent work examines the fragile and reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman worlds. Cast from the bark of distressed trees, my latex skins register moments of ecological rupture and renewal. These surfaces are not reproductions but collaborations, acts of listening and care that challenge human claims to mastery over the natural world. Each impression documents a shared temporality: the time of the tree’s healing, the time of material transformation, and the time of human attention.

Working in dialogue with ideas of counter sovereignty, I seek to undo the boundaries that define ownership, authorship, and control. The latex itself resists permanence; it shifts color, shrinks, and breaks down, asserting its own agency. This instability mirrors the unsettled state of the environments from which it comes, where resilience and collapse coexist. By yielding authority to the materials and to the living systems they emerge from, I aim to imagine other ways of belonging rooted in reciprocity, vulnerability, and the capacity to listen.

Ultimately, the work becomes a record of care rather than conquest, a counter sovereign gesture toward an ethics of coexistence. It asks what it might mean to stand with, rather than over, the world that sustains us.