For Noriko

​​For Noriko, 2023, stoneware, butterscotch candy, 70x40x30 inches.

Much of my girlhood was informed by my beautiful and fraught relationship with my mother. My beginning was all blood and guts – a visceral, violent happening and a miraculous act. I came into existence by my mother’s strongest magic, and watched that strength fade as she battled cancer. She died two days before my sixteenth birthday.

This piece reflects the violence, crushing expectation, and magic that surrounds my mother’s body and my own. This piece sits in conversation with Felix Gonzales-Torres’s 1991 piece Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA). The 175 pound pile of candy reflects on the diminishment of the body of Gonzales-Torres’s partner as he slowly died of AIDS. As audience members take pieces of candy from the pile, they both connect with the work and contribute to its gradual disappearance – an act of consumption and communion. Unlike Gonzales-Torres’s piece, the candy in For Noriko will never be replenished, though the figure/vessel will remain.