The Body Is a Fragile Territory is an evolving body of work investigating what it means to take material form in a world defined by change.

Working across photography, handmade paper, cyanotype, light, ash, charcoal, and installation, I am thinking about the body not only as human anatomy, but as a condition shared across bodies, landscapes, and materials. Skin, paper, shoreline, and earth become kinds of territory: porous, marked by experience, vulnerable to pressure and time, capable of holding memory, and inevitably subject to transformation.

Handmade paper is central to this inquiry. I am drawn to its contradictions: it can appear extraordinarily delicate while possessing remarkable strength. It can tear, wrinkle, become translucent, receive an image, hold the remains of another material, or allow light to pass through it. Paper can behave like skin, membrane, scar, map, or landscape without representing any of them literally.

Light has become another material in the work. It reveals the body while simultaneously producing shadow. In recent experiments, photographs of my own body moving into and out of natural light are translated into negatives and cyanotypes on handmade paper, then returned to light and photographed again. Distance, exposure, and material transformation interrupt the image at each stage, allowing information to emerge, soften, or disappear.

Other iterations incorporate ash and charcoal from fire-affected landscapes, translucent fibers, circular sheets, punctures, seams, and suspended fields of paper. Across these forms, I return to questions of presence and absence, grief and impermanence, and what remains when a physical form changes: an impression, a shadow, ash, a photograph, a memory, a mark in the land.

What does it mean to take form, knowing that form is temporary?

This page gathers photographs, material studies, and installation experiments from an ongoing process of research and making.