The transitory and fragile nature of life, its startling pairing of cruelty with beauty, compel me to make installations, objects and drawings that begin with the familiar but gradually reveal contradiction, absence, outrage, and humor. I am drawn to the objects we accumulate in our illusory quest for permanence. Taking them apart becomes a form of excavation: a way of uncovering hidden structures, histories, and the labor embedded within.

My recent work begins with textiles and clothing: materials that sit close to the body while carrying histories of class, gender, work, and identity. I am interested in whose labor becomes visible and whose disappears into the background, and how wear, dirt, tears, repairs, and alterations function as an archive of lives lived.

In Wearing, I unravel braided rugs common to old houses and reconstruct their materials into garments and objects. Traditionally made by working-class women from moth-eaten coats, old blankets, and discarded clothing, the rugs contain multiple lives. Unbraiding them reveals exuberant colors and patterns that have been hidden for decades, along with dotted holes worn away by years of footsteps, mapping human movement through domestic space. I press and sew the recovered strips into cloth, leaving the original rug attached so that the material hovers between past and present, floor and body, object and garment.

My process becomes a collaboration with each anonymous maker. As I disassemble each rug, I gather clues about the maker, working alone or in company, transforming worn materials through ingenuity, necessity, and care. I think of the resulting works as memorial sculptures: attempts to bring overlooked labor and lives from background to foreground. Often I make pieces with specific women in mind and invite contemporary artists to wear or activate them, connecting voices across time: fragile and strong, loud, seething, quiet, no longer invisible.

Shirting approaches similar questions through the corporate shirt, a garment associated with professional authority and class. Forms cut directly from shirts become dustpans, brooms, and other tools of cleaning and maintenance, bringing the uniform of authority into physical contact with the often invisible labor that supports it. The negative spaces left behind register absence and the passage of time. Drawings derived from shirt patterns dismantle and reconfigure the garment into a language of abstraction.

Across these bodies of work, I use acts of dismantling, repair, and reconstruction to examine how objects absorb human experience. I am interested in what becomes visible when familiar things are taken apart: the ingenuity and striving of their makers, hierarchies of labor and class, histories of use, and the fragile evidence of bodies that have moved through them.