As with my past works that deal with power structures, I’m interested in Michel Foucault’s concept of power: not as something that is possessed, but rather the shaping of individuals and society through discipline, whether self-imposed or enforced by another. The figures in my series are assemblages of this; constructs of power expressed in material form, as an unending discipline. Kinbaku-bi is a style of rope bondage hailing from Japan. There is a time limit on being bound in the more complex kinbaku-bi ties before a person loses a sense of themselves, goes numb, or sustains nerve damage. This time-based engagement limits the desire tunnel, or gaze. Once the limit is hit, the rigger must undo the bind in reverse order and within a reasonable timeframe, allowing the submissive subject to come undone. In the practice of kinbaku-bi, the submissive consents to enduring discomfort and pain for the release at a predetermined end. With this series, I explore what it means to bind something that cannot fall apart; what it means to be reminded of this physical and conceptual tightness indefinitely. The brutality of this work is that there is no release.

NEVER LET ME GO | XXXII. the giver of scars (2025) is the only leather work in this series that I have repaired; the hide was acquired with a severe cut, which I repaired using under-stitching, in a manner similar to the surgical technique that limits scarring. NEVER LET ME GO | XL. slick bind (2025) features marks from folding and creasing as a direct reference to Piero Manzoni’s “Achrome” series, where I have found both affirmation and inspiration—particularly, in his incorporation of products of the body and the transference of folded and creased forms into artworks. NEVER LET ME GO | XLIV. the zenith (2025) involves a work bound in the indefinite holding of a large cut of bamboo which, in the practice of kinbaku-bi, serves as a frame from which a human is suspended. In this case, I have reversed the function of the object by making the leather hide canvas hold the bamboo. NEVER LET ME GO | XXXVII. stay ready (2025) is one of three works in the exhibition that feature a steel suspension device bound to the hide canvas. In stay ready, the steel device is an early-1900s hanger that is used in meat drying processes. The violence of the bound object set against the leather hide was purely an impulse to render a horrifying silhouette of beauty, one that does not allow me to ignore the relationship between the leather and the device.

For PURE GAZE, I wanted to explore making work from a pure aesthetic framework, as well as the complexity of doing so, given my subjective being and intersectional identity, and its entanglement with society and the world. The attempt involved taking the position of the pure gaze in the studio; it felt more honest and allowed me to work from something internal to my process, towards the production of aesthetic-based work. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s 1993 text The Field of Cultural Production, this was a way of acknowledging and suspending the subjective nature of my gaze, to prioritize form and aesthetic experience detached from practicality, function or social meaning. This work is a study of painting and sculpture. It is equally an attempt to create material culture from Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, which speaks of the unconscious means by which dominant groups exert power over subordinate groups. 

The method of my practice, kinbaku-bi, the beauty of tight binding, has brought me an understanding of material accountability—that the inanimate object, too, suffers bruising, welting, scarring and indentations under pressure, and retains the marks of this duress. These leather hides have been treated in the same ways as my previous leather works—with a top-down shine technique, dyeing, and dealing with the temperamental aspects of the dermis, or skin. The dye penetrates the dermis of the leather and therefore creates a hold from within the hide. With PURE GAZE, I unpack the notion of the gaze as it relates to aesthetics and values, with a desire to complicate its traditional definition as a perception assumed to exist, as in the perception of how people perceive you. This gesture has allowed me to sort through the messiness of abject ideas that relate to the material culture of leather, desire, pleasure, and what it means to be bound to it all.