I create large-scale sculptures, installations, land-art interventions and performances using materials that emerge from the planet; aluminum foil, steel and copper wire, paper and various minerals. My creations, born out of land-art interventions, evoke the sublime and the otherworldly, prompting inquiry into the physical, metaphorical and mystical entanglements between human beings, the beyond-human, and the unknownn.
My work is informed by my scientific training as well as philosophical, cosmological, and literary research. I venture into natural environments to hand-mould black aluminum foil onto natural entities like rocks and root systems. I consider the latter as therapeutic field work intended to reconcile with my refugee parents’ traumatic relationship with the great outdoors. During these land-art interventions, I collect records of the planet’s transforming body: its skin, folds and arteries, continually wounded and mending. Like the universe that surrounds us but remains opaque to us, my laborious process of envelopment metamorphoses these recognizable natural forms grazed by sunlight back to the silent darkness of the Cosmos.
My recent sculptural and installation works are characterized by the hybridization of the material, the haptic and the mystical: abstract, natural forms coexist with scars, wrinkles, and emotions, amplifying physicist and theorist Karen Barad’s stance that “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”. Through the slow process of touch, I commune with the physical world and the elementary forces that assail and sculpt the planet, aiming to elicit awe to rekindle humanity’s kinship with the unknown and the cosmic.
I was born and raised in Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal, Canada). I earned an MFA in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University (2022) and am a graduate of Concordia University (BFA in Studio Arts, 2019) and McGill University (PhD in Chemistry, 2015).