My thesis work is titled Tender Barriers: the body as the meeting of internal and external worlds. With this work I’m interested in the reciprocity between the physical self and mental/emotional self. The body is the container for identity, for consciousness and agency, but it is also a physical barrier and boundary.The physical space taken up by a body is finite, but the internal space of the mind is potentially infinite. With these concerns in mind, my body amendment sculptures attempt to translate emotional burden into physical burden, making visible the shape of my internal world. Blue is used to connect the surface of the body to other familiar surfaces with unknown depth, such as the sky and the ocean. I’m fascinated by what grows in these unexplored spaces, so I’ve used forms inspired by deep sea life, caves, and virus formations to represent the unknown depths of the mind.