Invitation (2024),

Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts

acrylic paintings, milkweed, candle, beads, incense, written notes

2 ft x 1-2 ft (paintings)

This installation invited viewers to engage with some of my "feeling bodies," visual representations of feelings as non-human entities, in a natural setting. Set against an earthly backdrop, the biological, non-human entities are intended to evoke a sense of futurity, an existence of a world beyond this one in which we are being invited to consider feelings from a relational perspective. What would it mean to give feelings a life of their own outside of the body?

In a contemporary climate of crisis where heightened resource scarcity and increasing social isolation is accompanied by a broad cultural shift towards individualism, it is more crucial than ever to find collective ways of relating and being in community. Ongoing social and environmental crises create barriers to connecting with our bodies and to each other. Amidst this broader social context my feeling bodies are an invitation to connect with emotions as embodied forms, beings with which we find ourselves in community with.  

The feeling bodies exhibited here, hope for the future (left) and spiritual connection (right), were placed in a tree to symbolize a rooting into and growth of new possibility - facilitated by humans' shifting relationship to science, technology, and nature. Hope for the future was placed above an 'altar,' with a candle, incense, milkweed, and bowl of messages. Each message invited the viewer to engage in an activity meant to elicit one of the emotions the feeling bodies were trying to communicate (connection, longing, hope).

Click Here for a Video demonstrating how a viewer might interact with one of these messages, taking up the “Invitation” to sit with Hope for the Future and Spiritual Connection.