We Are Here: Recomposed is an installation of text and image exploring embodiment. The work is rooted in the body, but with a sense that things are off, that failures have occurred. This non-normative body is living the array of experiences that exist within the disabled narrative: pain, pleasure, play, love, fear… Inspiration is drawn heavily from a science-like inquiry of my own body-based life experiences. I am interested in the impact of failure, how it queers the affected body, and how artists make sense of the body through reconstruction and representation. In We Are Here: Recomposed, dense layering, word play, and physical manipulation of surface suggest skin, organs, rupture, permeability, tender moments, and the alluring. My work blurs repulsion and attraction, disgust and seduction. Color references flesh, toxicity, and the medical. From behind a guise of quiet invitation, deformities emerge, and shifts occur. If perception is stitched from countless bits of information and experience, I aim to pull the stitches, and reconfigure the pieces.

By request of the author, the accompanying Thesis paper is Open Access and is accessible to the public.