This work was produced while in residence at the Arts and Industry Residency at the Kohler Foundry in the fall of 2023.

All sculptures are made of cast iron and brass and combined with found iron slag, fabricated metal armatures or video performance. Installation images also include works on paper and digital prints on fabric.

Photographs courtesy of Portrait Society Gallery during the exhibition “Grace and Grit” in March-April 2024.

To see the potential of materials and to make beauty in the factory environment is a privilege like no other. The Arts/Industry Residency in the Kohler foundry facilitates such an insistence on beauty amidst industrial grit and incessant labor. It allows for using cold and hard materials such as iron, and brass to be made into delicate, fragile objects that embody the dichotomies of form and content. My instinct while at the foundry was to soften a harsh environment in some way, to respond and play against its incessant noise, controlled chaos, and structured labor.

My focus was on using the properties of metal to explore notions of weight, strength, and resilience as I see them existing around me – in women, in human labor, and in the ingenuity of nature. The works in the front gallery are in honor of the women in my family but also the strength of so many women around me. They balance grace and grit in resilient and precarious ways amidst the texture of everyday challenges. In my work, the braid is a symbol of patriarchal or colonial control, fabric represents the softness of the body against the hardness of labor. Flowers complement the weight of cast iron and brass, thread becomes a narrative wrapped and bound into weighty objects. This kind of strength is embedded in patience and endurance that doesn’t break when life gets difficult.

In Buddhism, the bud of the lotus symbolizes potential; the mud is suffering and so, the lotus is an inspiration for human beings to transcend suffering. Fresh flowers 3D scanned in India and 3D printed here and cast in brass, become part of sculptures made with found iron slag normally discarded in a factory setting. They capture the resilience of nature and the possibility of finding beauty in the most unexpected places. 

This exhibition examines complementary ideas of grace and grit as seen in nature, women, and everyday human labor. The body in a factory environment seems fragile and small. But this very body is what makes the machinery function. One cannot function without the other. Buddhist teacher Tich Nhat Hanh said “There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.”