Harry Wood Gallery

‘Relic’, Group Show, 2025

(Ongoing Project) In 2024, I began working with a bodybuilder, who appears across all the works in this project. I wanted to have conversations about how the two of us relate to the exertion and timeline of the human body. My father was a bodybuilder, and a culture of sport and endurance shaped my childhood.

In this project I’m echoing classical Western conventions of the human form in sculpture and the historical understanding of archeological remnants of our early human kin – bodies unearthed, petrified into permanence. These references exist as a reminder that bodies, alive or deceased, are always negotiating between becoming and collapse. Wet clay hardens; the fiber tears to heal. To build is to break. 

I direct the performer’s movement in real time, calling out cues and establishing parameters that fracture the body into parts. The figure becomes a single muscle fiber, straining against its sheath as it grows. The human body can be a terrain where discrepancy emerges from repetition.

Bodybuilding is a discipline of controlled destruction and regeneration — a body carved and calloused, caught between erosion and monument. Rooted in photography, As Weight Turns unfolds through the exertion of a single performer, whose articulation is magnified, dissected, and reassembled through the still lens. What begins as a prompt of embodying the micro becomes a study in physical endurance, temporal fragility, and the desire to calcify, to last, or remain at apex.