Fatigue Threshold
Three-person exhibition, "Witness | Recover | Persist: Practicing Survival in Global Art History," Washington University in St. Louis, 2022.
Fatigue Threshold is a series of large-scale installations in which translucent, hand-dyed silk is stretched across domestic armatures: a trampoline frame, a clothes-drying rack, a metal bed frame. The silk is sagging, frayed, and strained past the point of recovery. Each structure makes visible the breaking point of caregiving, bodies pushed beyond capacity by simultaneous, undervalued labors.
The domestic objects are not incidental. Clothes-drying racks and bed frames are designed to hold things up. Here they become the thin infrastructure across which maternal bodies are over-extended, pinned, splayed, tied to four corners at once. The trampoline's jumping mat, replaced entirely with withered silk, collapses under accumulated weight.
The silk is dyed using decoctions of plants historically associated with fertility and reproductive health, grounding the color in the specific biochemistry of the maternal body. As art historian Tola Porter wrote of the series, these "exhausted forms put the pressures of private space caregiving on public display."