The difference between being a body and having a body is that being a body is in direct conversation with one’s physical presence—to shift weight, to breath, to sense—and having a body implies that our bodies stand for some larger context in direct conversation with culture, sometimes becoming a symbolic political object. On a basic scale, COVID-19 called attention to the limitations of our physical bodies: to touch, to breath, to see. On a more complex level, it highlighted social inequity: the violence shown against black communities highlights that there is a difference existing in a body so steeped in politics.

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Drawing inspiration from the illustrations in Fridolin Franse Frisiert by Michael Roher, and their ability to communicate the oneness of the individual and the multitude of experiences contained within simultaneously, this work centers thoughts about care through an accumulation of small intimate gestures. In this case, that gesture is a stitch and another stitch and another…emphasizing the seaming together of appliquéd, sewn, silver meaty pieces hung and displayed for visual consumption.

 

These bodies are abstracted, showing small visual resemblances to an orifice here and a protuberance there but never replicating a body exactly. In the abstraction, these gestures contemplate through hand sewing, stitch by stitch—the unfolding of the past years, what politics are steeped within so many of our bodies, an act that contemplates in its satire the ridiculousness of judging literal meat.