“Will I ever fall in Love? This is a phrase that I have been hearing more and more from friends. Given the current world health crisis, touch and relationships have become much more complicated and scarce. The absence of intimacy has accelerated a process in which our forms of communication are dependent on technology. In my own work, I examine the ways in which desire becomes embodied through the production and online distribution of consumer goods such as love dolls and toys. A couple of years back I began to be targeted by ads that clearly mistook me for someone else, a consumer of love dolls. Instead of rejecting these pop-ups I began to follow them and see where they led me. I was intrigued by these products, plastic casts of bodies, and how they promised access to hollowed-out experience of being with a woman.

These objects present themselves as substitutes for human interaction, but without any rights or agency beyond the desires of their users. As more of what we own is enhanced with artificial intelligence, I question the positive and negative traits these being-objects will inherit from us. With most online platforms being built by white cis men that rarely experience lack of safety, how can we build better support structures into the online environments we inhabit?

With these non-human bodies in mind, I design and print my own fabric digitally using imagery sourced from sites that sell products inspired by the female figure. I then construct foam armature and a set of custom patterns for fabric in order to create anthropomorphic mutations that are a fusion of fast fashion, interior design, and flesh. My goal with this work is to juxtapose slower, hand-crafted techniques along with newer fabrication processes as a way to animate visual and temperamental criticality in the sculptures, which is my way of giving agency to the non-sentient. When making these pieces I am thinking about the history of feminist art that looks at the objectification of women’s bodies. I want to flip the expectation and look at how objects become human.”