Kuwero (2024), video, 17 minutes and 33 seconds

Selected stills from Kuwero (2024)

Through this abstracted footage of a multilayered piece of natural rubber that I constructed and manipulated from my sculpture-based practice, I am seeking to investigate ontological questions regarding the adaptation and survival of all beings through a unifying feature: the skin. I imagine all entities—human and nonhuman, living and nonliving—as having some sort of skinlike component, whether it simply be an outer surface, a protective barrier, a layer of coating, a permeable boundary, or a material threshold. The tangibility of separation is what inspired this work and what ultimately brought my artistic vision to life. In this piece, I am focused on exploring the mutability inherent in the notion of skin and visualize the role that it plays as an active agent in critically mediating the external from the internal and the environment from the self. In this sense, the skin occupies a very curious space between subject and object—allowing us to distinguish our positionality in the world and determine where we end and everything else begins.