A Confluence of Signs

2019–ongoing

A Confluence of Signs is an ongoing body of works formed through collage, bilateral gesture, and layered image processes. The works follow how bodies carry, deposit, and transmit signals as they move through different environments, shaped by dispersal, accumulation, and adaptation.

These works developed during a period of bodily constraint, when movement through the world was limited and attention turned inward. Rather than stillness, this revealed a moving landscape held within the body itself. Images form through sustained attention to how fragments gather over time, bringing together lived material where bodies and places appear as dense assemblies rather than singular or stable forms. Field photographs, bilateral drawings, and material fragments are cut, layered, and recombined to attend to how place settles into the body, and how bodies carry those conditions forward.

Figures appear as composite forms assembled from ground, vegetation, stone, weathered surfaces, and gesture. They stand temporarily within sites, formed through encounter rather than representation. Each figure operates as a gathering of signals, holding material from multiple places at once.

Some works in this series draw directly from earlier practices of microbial and material intelligence. The figures function as temporary, initiatory assemblages of endosymbiosis and symbiosis, considering forms of shared being that would later be worked through more durationally. Rather than metaphor, the work remains embodied and literal. Signals are treated as things that move, lodge, combine, and transform through contact. Bodies are understood as sites of transmission, not as closed forms.

Bilateral drawing functions as a structuring action within this process. Gestures generated by both hands cut, interrupt, and reassemble fragments. Difference, asymmetry, and repetition allow pattern to shift, hold, or fracture in response to accumulated pressure. Images take shape through negotiation rather than design.

The works attend to transmission across time and systems. Environmental conditions, social climates, and human-made weather systems continue to affect bodies beyond immediate contact. Movement through place becomes a form of dispersal. Bodies act as carriers, transporting sensory information, stress responses, and learned adaptations between sites. These processes follow microbial logics. Signals persist, mutate, amplify, or fall dormant depending on conditions rather than intention.

The figures do not resolve into fixed identities. They remain assembled, altered by movement, accumulation, and the conditions that formed them. What appears holds how bodies and places continue to shape one another under pressure.

This body of work remains ongoing.