Ashes to Ashes
2021-ongoing

 Ashes to Ashes is a body of work that situates the garden and the grave—as site, material, and metaphor—for the exploration of loss, grief, legacy, memory, resilience, and repair on both a deeply personal level and at the scale of global ecological collapse. I delicately navigate through nuanced emotions surrounding hushed subjects, touching on autobiographical and shared narratives around childlessness, infertility, and miscarriage; addressing the ongoing losses of the Anthropocene; and broaching the broader subjects of death and our precarious relationship with the earth.

Envisioned as embodied poème-objets, the multimedia art installations in Ashes to Ashes engage the ground (soil, grass, sand), plants, stones, and other natural elements in combination with man-made forms, sound, video, and text. These assemblages are then activated by performative elements borrowed from funeral rites, burial practices, memorial customs, ritual acts of care, and my own ancestral spiritual practices around death and remembrance.

Through this work, I openly confront topics of mortality, the preciousness of life, and death as well as our relationship with the planet, in resistance against our death-phobic culture and against speciesist beliefs that prioritize humans over all other kinds of life. And I explore deeper philosophical questions such as: As a childfree woman, what does it look like for me to parent or nurture? What does it mean to create a legacy? Societally, what value do we place on the role of nurturing? To which communities does the responsibility of nurturing fall? What happens to our bodies when we die? How do we honor or dishonor the earth through the various processes of interment? How do we grieve? And through what modes and rituals do we remember?