untitled (2026)
oriented strand board, concrete, sticks, plaster, brass, bioplastic made of glycerine and agar, marigold dye, marigold petals, insect exoskeletons
There is a flow between our bodies and the materials that surround us. When we make things, we’re shaping the material world, and those things that we make also start to shape us. I think of this relationship in terms of human labor, and search for it everywhere. Using construction materials, art materials, and invented substances, I explore the ways that we embed our ideas, our politics, and our emotions into the material world.
In this work, I am specifically interested in oriented strand board, the ubiquitous construction material used primarily for sheathing houses. OSB is made from logs too small or damaged to make into lumber; instead, they are collected from logging areas, shipped to processing facilities, chipped down, pressed into boards, and redistributed out to big box stores. Each “strand” of wood in OSB comes from a specific tree in a specific place, but as it travels through the supply chain, it loses its specificity and becomes symbolically placeless. OSB becomes symbolically labor-less as well, as its industrial production obscures the people required to produce it. I am interested in the political implications of this obscuring of place and labor: whose labor is visible and what materials are privileged in contemporary society, and why? By engaging artistically with industrial materials, I attempt to conceptually draw out the labor implicit in their production.