The essential and evocative bodily elements of skin, bones, and hair are developed into fantastic elaborations in my sculpture and drawing. Pushing the physical into a realm of psychological space, my work vacillates between vitality and mortality, stability and fragility, and the abject and the sensual. In these corporeal re-imaginings, the body becomes the border space where existence meets the uncanny.

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In Paradise Lost, John Milton illustrates the Earth as a mere, infinitely small speck hanging by a delicate golden chain from the Heavens above. Surrounded by these two immense, unimaginable expanses of Heaven and Hell, this delicate support that suspends Earth can easily be broken by a single action. Likewise, the spine, our own fragile support mechanism, subjects us to a similar vulnerability.

I address this vulnerability through an appropriation of senbazuru, the Japanese tradition of crafting and displaying a thousand paper cranes to help grant wishes of health and good luck. By substituting vertebrae for cranes and re-interpreting the traditional senbazuru display system, I have created a meditation on Milton's metaphor that derives from the weight of my own history and memory.