To Make the Present Waver

An ongoing ceramic installation to facilitate communication with the past

“To make the present waver” draws inspiration from Avery Gordon’s landmark scholarship on hauntology, Ghostly Matters (1997). Gordon extends the work of Marxist philosophers who claim that spectrality is what makes the present waver. My sculptures reimagine Victorian-era mourning artifacts as conduits, carefully crafted to amplify bereavement. With ceramics, fiber, found objects, and chain, I construct precarious, otherworldly hanging sculptures that invite reverence and ritual. My work takes poetic inspiration from the ecological concept of ghost species--genetic traces of ancestral life that leave no fossil record, persisting only in the DNA of living organisms. Indeed, the sculptures exist in memoriam to unrealized futures and lost histories that remain beyond reach. 

My practice is parafictional: it syncretically blends imagined mourning rituals with research into historical and cross-cultural practices of grief. Referencing historical “safety coffins” designed to prevent premature burial, the sculptures incorporate tubes, bells, and suspended vessels containing herbs, salt, or ash. Functioning as deconstructed alert systems, these forms respond to airflow and touch, suggesting metaphysical pathways for communication with the dead. My long-term goal is to create monument-scale installations that function as sites for collective acts of grief. I envision these works as spaces where sculpture and ritual converge, inviting audiences to engage loss not as a private condition, but as a shared, transformative experience.