Hard Milk
Installation, 2020.
A balloon filled with small rocks, pinned to the wall with a black diaper pin.
Pregnancy and postpartum remake the body from the inside, temporarily, completely, in ways that have no precedent in prior experience. The tissue does something it has never done. The scale shifts. The interior becomes unfamiliar. These states are not quite wonder and not quite horror but occupy the space between, and they end before they can be fully accounted for.
Chronic mastitis is one such state. The breast inflames and hardens, dense with infection, unrecognizable to its own inhabitant. This work tries to hold that experience materially: latex stretched over gravel, irregular and weighted, pinned to the wall with a diaper pin. The pin is made for soft things. What it holds here is not soft.
The somatic fact of a body in transformation resists documentation. The work does not resolve this. It makes the density present, briefly, in a room.