Rooted

Artist Statement

The foot is one of the only parts of the human body that physically touches the Earth. It functions to balance, support, and create movement in relationship with its environment. As people we are socially conditioned to believe that we must settle, you need to stop your movement, you must find balance, you must find support. You are supposed to be grounded, you are supposed to have a place you belong to, you are supposed to have a home. Much of your identity and sense of self rests on a simple, “where are you from”.

“Rooted” seeks to take the complex reflections on the body as a medium of self-expression, identity, silence, tension, and survival by Louise Bourgeois and Marina Abramovic and apply them to my own experiences with extreme residential mobility. I have never felt the emotion or feeling of being grounded, of having stability, or of belonging somewhere. I never stayed in one place long enough to be a part of it, I am not “from” anywhere. My feet are my home, my mind is my home, my hands are my home, and I belong wherever they take me. Socially, I have never felt like being unstable was anything other than negative, I have waged an internal battle for ages trying to make myself a person I am not, to find somewhere to plant myself. However, I don’t need to. I am constant, my feet are constant, and they collect the artifacts of my experiences, my scars, my cuts, my ragged nails. My roots will grow around my form and burst outward to spark new growth.

The form itself is informed by my own body, my plaster cast, and the work of Bourgeois. I wanted the foot to be accurate and lifelike, juxtaposed by the whimsical roots & branches forms that create a theatrical height, bursting, wrapping, and interacting with the mass of the form. I also wanted to vary smooth and rough surface textures to create moments of silence and challenge the viewer to consider relationship with material. I often am inspired by the natural world, considering our trips to the Ancestors and my sketches as well to inform my final piece. I also chose to have the form of the foot itself upturned to show instability, and the motion of the roots around the foot as growing outwards and expanding with the body as opposed to locked into the ground.