I am a Chicago based artist teaching at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts. I create site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engage present day histories to imagine alternative futures.
My background in craft orients my projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. I often work with long-term and ongoing collaborators and together we engage multiple communities and elicit working relationships with experts in the fields of botany, political activism, biology, legal scholarship and activism, and science fiction.
Always interested in history, more recently, I have been drawn to imagined futures, specifically a future that includes human survival. Looking to past feminist strategies, including collective action and equity politics, I work in large-scale sculptural forms that allow audiences a role in thinking through the making or completing the work. The boundary between human and nonhuman agency is pressing thinner. I follow specific material lineages, sometimes a tree species, sometimes porcelain, to map our varied and complex relationships. In doing so, I work in concert with objects as collaborators, agent-provocateurs, and narrative instigators.