Statement

For years I have been making performative videos based on insect behaviors in which I am the insect: twitching, chewing, courting, stridulating and often dying. The videos are sometimes jerky and rapid, with body parts moving in impossible ways. Or the pieces may be slow and strange, evoking processes of growing and rotting. The movements that happen within these works generate layered soundscapes; a vibrating arm sounds like a thrumming cicada, and a slowly bending torso sounds like an old tree moaning and cracking. There may be an undercurrent of dove song.

Through drawing, I reflect on these videos and performances, and I explore the invertebrate world in a language that is informed by a collision of scientific and storybook illustration. I imagine myself with insect body parts, and imagine the relationships I would have: how I would raise a brood of spider babies, mate with a slug, or drink honeydew from an aphid's abdomen.

Over the course of my invertebrate explorations, I have met entomologists, botanists, horticulturists, physicists and other specialists. I had the opportunity to learn about their practices and become captivated. In my new work I investigate this fascinating scientific world as a passionate outsider. I continue to take the role of the performer, but now I am inserting myself into experiments. My practice involves research, collaboration with specialists, and field work, but my videos move away from strict science; they are poetic and tactile, subjective and sensual, often fraudulent explorations of scientific ideas.

In my current videos, my body is a tool for measurement, and I use it to examine the effects of invasive insects on forests, fundamental constants of the universe, or the chemical processes of decomposition. Sound continues to play an important role in creating narrative: one can hear the whirring of a Fizeau apparatus that is measuring the speed of light, an electrical hum, fingers rustling leaves, water dripping, or the sound of gravity pulling two bodies together. I examine the place where science and art must part ways; and I force them back together again.