Stone Tape (2025)

Prairie Ronde Artist in Residence in Vicksburg, MI

Materials: Projected animation inside the Mill (Stone Tape), liquid charcoal on paper (shadows), 3D animated LIDAR scans of the interior of the Mill (portals)

Stone Tape Theory is a paranormal and pseudoscientific theory where certain building materials have the ability to record and play back memories, events, and other ghosts from the past.

I don’t think it’s possible to fathom the scale of the former Lee Paper Company Mill’s interiors without moving through them in awe of their towering walls and tumbling caverns below. The rooms are impossible to capture with only your eyes or a photograph; these spaces demand that you move through them and map their paths and halls and catwalks and infrastructure onto your body.

I came to the Mill because I wanted to meet the ghosts of industry. Shadows appear and fade across the floors and up the walls. Portals lie gaping between levels, echoing even the tiniest sound through interconnected resonant cavities.

Our world is haunted by hidden hands, the ghostly bodies who make the fabric, objects, and material reality of our day to day existence. I wonder if we fear the haunting because we fear disintegration, fracturing, or giving our lives to something and then being forgotten and lost to time?

I met the ghosts again in photographs, and I painted their shadows. I focused on the mechanics of their gestures, on where they favored their weight and balance, on how they held themselves and one another, where they were stiff and where they hurt, and the way they held their hands.

All of time and tragedy and hope and dreams collapse into each other and surface as the echoing exhalations of the wind whipping through the soaring windows. Shadows crawl along the floors and walls, down through the portals where the machines used to live, and over the mounds of dried pulp entombed below.

Remember too, we all must die…, but the stone tape is not erased.

The Mill + Process

Shadows

Portals

Stone Tape

Corrupted Uncorrupted (2024)

2024 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI

For my MFA Thesis installation, I was inspired by “cabinets of curiosities” as framework to create an assemblage of stories and perspectives about the body, health, and mortality.

I was drawn to these collections of “unusual” objects because they offer a framework for telling multi-layered stories, including: the story of the individual objects, the stories of the objects in relation to one another, the story of the sometimes “invisible” or anonymous collector, and the story that a viewer might construct between themselves and the collection.

Read more about the conceptual development and research process on the MSU CAL News page here!

Corrupted Uncorrupted

Diaphonized

Messy Animation Desk + Flipbooks

Overture(Polar) (2022)

Overture(Polar), New Horizons Gallery at the MSU Museum, East Lansing, MI, 2022

This started as an obsession with glaciers as archives of data, and a desire to illustrate these otherwise unseen depths. All too often, we value the world around us for its untapped resources or potential economic advantages. And it is too easy to forget both the interdependence between ourselves and our planet, and the importance of advocating for nature’s agency and protection.

The United States is an Arctic Nation, yet so many of us are geographically removed from polar regions, but we still indirectly interact with the polar ice caps. Instead of a claim to the natural resources and potential economic advantages of a particular region, maybe instead this means that we have a responsibility to the protection of this ecosystem, and an obligation of service to the people, flora, and fauna whose survival depends on the stability of polar ice whether directly or indirectly.