The othering event

Ongoing project: drawings, texts, installation (in development)

During COVID I started seeing images. Dystopian but also absurd: blob-like beings that had crash-landed on Earth, misshapen and leaking. Flesh—human skin—hanging, trembling, quivering. Connected to recognizable materials: fishnet stockings, patent leather, plush. Animal elements scattered wrong: faceted eyes, scales, limbs in impossible places. And everything dripping—not blood, but saps, slime, fluids that shouldn't exist.

Nothing about them aligned with how we understand bodies. Grotesque, but primarily pathetic. Vulnerable in ways that make you uncomfortable.
I drew them compulsively. Wrote texts about how people would react: some wanted to free them from their suffering, others panicked, found them threatening, wanted to run them over or beat them to death. That split fascinated me.

The work investigates othering—that instant when we encounter radical difference and must choose: help or destroy? The installation I'm developing doesn't let viewers observe from safe distance. You're on that street. These beings appeared overnight in unexpected places throughout your city, helpless, fleshy, wrong, leaking. What do you do?

The drawings are studies for a larger scenario. I'm working toward sculptural moments—stills from this event—constructed from materials as loaded as their forms. That human flesh combined with cheap, sexualized, childish textures that exist at respectability's margins.

This isn't science fiction set safely in the future. It's a question about now: how do we deal with vulnerability that doesn't perform correctly? With bodies—flesh, skin, fluids—that refuse to conform? With difference that crashes into our ordered world without asking permission?

Some viewers will want to rescue these beings. Others will want them eliminated. That split—that moment of recognition when you realize your own impulse—is the work.