I Cut My Arms Off So That I Could Fly. Woven bed sheets, natural dyes (blueberries, herbs), found materials, printed photographs. 2024
Image altered in Adobe Photoshop.
Collecting parts of the changing atmosphere around me, I move as though to sew a connection between a place and I, past and present, and extremes (contradicting opposites such as preservation and destruction). Nestled in the corner of Germany’s Alps lies Garmisch-Partenkirchen, home to the 1936 Olympics, which tunneled the valley town to be the backyard of the Zugspitze Ski Arena. The Schneeferner Glacier, no longer a glacier as of 2022 due to rise in global temperatures, glistens inside the Zugspitzplatt bowl, beckoning some 500,000 visitors a year to come ski and take in the view of Germany’s highest mountain. An ongoing piece, I Cut Off My Arms So That I Could Fly, are woven arms that embody personal reflection and the historical relationship between the valley, the glacier, and its inhabitants. The methods of making these sleeve arms call to ‘extremes’ through the process of washing, boiling, stripping, and tethering that the sheets experience. Weaving them into arms that hold debris from fallen down trees, litter, and picture scraps that I’ve collected over time, carrying their own narrative. The arms themselves become activated as I carry the work up to the Schneeferner Glacier to photograph this conversation between history and ecology, my body as a vessel. Personal risk taking, adversity, the challenging of preconceived notions, and trudging through the natural and the contaminated all exist in this exchange. At the top of the ski slope, just below the Schneeferner Glacier, putting the piece on, the cotton tendrils flying in the wind as I prepare to ski down to the bottom, bringing my art for the earth to the arena where environmental, mental, and ideological extremes dance in a frenzy of matter.
Close-up of horse chestnut shells entangled in bed sheets.