05/22/2023 - 06/05/2023
BEAMS Residency

Ouroboros is a series of six works created during a two-week residency at the previously abandoned Teatrihoov theatre in Viljandi, Estonia. The series is titled after the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail in an infinite cycle of self-destruction and renewal; a symbol that captures my own navigation of neurodiverse sensory overload, masking, and burnout. Masking sensory overwhelm, perpetuated by exposure to a constant stream of digital information, is a never-ending chameleon behaviour that leads me into a continual forming and reforming of the ‘self’; monitoring and restricting my body, speech, and emotions to conform to social expectations.

Ouroboros, combines bodily movement, the fluidity of digital images, and embodied spatial installation to consider, through a neurodiverse lens, the contemporary sensorial experience of being grounded in a physical body while increasingly connected to nebular digital spaces. My figure, isolated and coded to bounce like a screensaver, is projected onto mirror acetate. Its reflected form warps between figuration and abstraction in tendrils and elastic expansions whose slow revolutions create a meditative, atemporal atmosphere. These slippages of my body’s identity are a direct result of its interaction with the invisible structures of the mirror surface and the architectural elements of the space itself.