A Place in the Swarm

Molting out of the religious influences of my childhood, I use metals to create new forms of permanence focusing instead on my reverence for nature. This work recrafts artifacts from an institution of control; contorting insect limbs into a monument asking for coalescence with organic life outside of human dominion. Locusts are not a species but a phenomenon; environmental instability and lack of resources pressures individual grasshoppers into a gregarious phase, it is then that they exhibit phenotypic plasticity and undergo biological shift in anatomy and psychology, the individual to a part of the swarm. Peril is not born, it is created. The grasshopper is not a threat as a lone unit and yet the locust swarm incomprehensibly outnumbers the individual and challenges human notions of independence; destabilizing the fantasy of the individualized soul and of free will.