Touch Me Gently, Please is a year-long project exploring corporeal grief in the marginalized body. This work was born out of a need to create vessels which housed this pain—which our capitalist society doesn't make space for—in order to externalize it. When these pieces stood before me, I could learn to care for these parts as peers. In doing so, I begin to reimagine a relationship with my body which holds this grief, rather than discards it. 

The exhibition centers three wax sculptures on steel pedestals fabricated to the height of my shoulders and scaled to the dimensions of my torso. Each sculpture contains an inclusion: hair, nail clippings, and shed skin. Along with the inclusions are scents which match products that I use to clean my body: perfume, deodorant, and soap. The casts were created by pouring hot wax into a mold and out again, creating a rigid hollow structure. The soft material wants to cave back into itself, to become a mound once again. The casting process is both physically labor-intensive and mentally exhausting—chasing an angular perfection that can never materialize from the work. This practice mirrors the exhaustive effort of living in a disabled body.

Distorted Polaroid photography capturing close-up images of my body, a piece of stretched latex, and a jarred SCOBY respond to the more formal works, rejecting the obsessive conformity of the casting process in favor of intuitive making. Paralleling the ever-evolving nature of the body, these works can be continually reconfigured to become new with each iteration. 

This project isn’t about my body—it’s about the communal pain of bodies. Participants are encouraged to intimately engage with the sculptures, to touch them gently. By presenting participants with this work, I hope to offer some salve to their body grief. In knowing that our pain is shared, I hope that they will get to know it, and hold it more softly.