“There is no such thing” was born out of an intuitive response to the macrocosm of the present in which the artist lives; what Colomina elegantly describes as the “physical and psychological pressures of being completely surrounded by technologies” [1]. When we imagine a pressure, we picture something pushing against us; both body and mind. Here the artist moves beyond representational edges and folds to reimagine a body that pushes back, departs from the “heaviness of space” [2] and makes the invisible visible.

“There is no such thing” is constructed from primal materials that nod to a timelessness of the human condition. Clay, container-like forms are embedded gesturally into a porous copper gauze whose hand-sewn strips redefine a feminine act by use of metal as thread. The copper mesh envelopes. Materials fuse, interact, and metaphorically reconfigure containment; the work’s title a direct reference to Zoe Sofia [3]. Forms emerge suspended in a potential space: an acoustic body clothed in a wired world of “all-at-onceness” [5]? Or perhaps cocooned in a faraday-like cage, immune from the persistent, kinetic pulse of the world? 

1-2. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? : Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Mul̈ler, 2016).

3-4. “There is no such thing as an organism [apart from the environment].” from: Zoe Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 181–201, https://doi.org/10.1353/hyp.2000.0029.

5. McLuhan as cited in Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart, “Forward through the Rearview Mirror : Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan,” The MIT Press, October 29, 1997, https://monoskop.org/images/f/fa/Forward_Through_the_Rearview_Mirror_Reflections_on_and_by_Marshall_McLuhan_1996.pdf.