Enveloped #3

This sculpture is part of my Enveloped series, which explores my fascination with life entombing other life, and how transformation can become a metaphor for escaping expectations and stereotypes. It reflects my own experience of being led to believe I had to follow a rigid script of masculinity, and of being treated as lesser throughout my childhood for being creative and drawn to the beautiful and uncanny. The work presents a dreamlike yet unsettling landscape built from natural and artificial crystals, borax, styrofoam, polymer clay, LEDs, and crystallized flowers. Dead insects are encased in resin, preserved within the terrain as if absorbed into its slow transformation. A hand-sculpted head lies bodyless and peaceful, the surrounding landscape becoming its surrogate body, as though identity itself has dissolved into the environment. Crystals rise like mountains, some hollow and glowing from within, their bases and cracks seeping light like liquid. The world here is desiccated, its candy-like towers and mineral formations standing amid a terrain that feels both precious and barren. Insects, plants, and human fragments merge into a single ecosystem, suggesting that nothing remains purely itself and everything is in the process of becoming something else. The piece was also used in an interactive projection work where dancers were superimposed onto a live video of the sculpture, merging movement with stillness and living bodies with constructed terrain. In this space, transformation becomes a form of resistance, and beauty emerges from the collapse of imposed identities. 30 x 24 x 18 in