My projects draw strength from ancestral influences, including intergenerational knowledge and vernacular traditions from my grandparents. Their work as floorers and railroad workers in Chicago has shaped my perception, turning my body into a tool for creation and the ground beneath it into a vessel of meaning.
Vinyl and linoleum sheet flooring is a man-made material that not only mimic natural elements like stone or wood but also mirror the structural base foundations of hospitals, schools, tenement housing and luxury hotels. Layer upon layer, it covers the floors of city blocks for generations after generations of synthetic world building. In the studio, I create controlled environments that enable me to cut, chop, shear, rub and burn into a stack of floors. Drawing from my years as a cellist, I then arrange these granular conditions much like one composes higher and lower pitches between the stanza of music. I work the gridded ground down with my body till they begin to take on my form, thus generating floors that function simultaneously as imprints, performance relics, concretions of lived experience, and materializations of possibility.
“My entire life, post womb, is theatre. For me the stage's glory is wrapped in Linoleum.”