Breaking and Mending

Abstract

Breaking and Mending presents an MFA thesis that embodies the format of a meandering interview between the artist, a loved one/themselves, choosing to forego a conventional academic statement. It treats the work’s refusal to resolve into a single, legible meaning not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition of taking it seriously. The practice rests on one unresolvable premise: that breaking and mending is a cyclical act. The sculptures bow under strain, work against their own materiality, and carry the visible and invisible evidence of the labor that made them. The conversation moves through the studio, that invisible labor, and what it means — as a queer, neurodivergent artist of color — to make work that declines to perform legibility. Interleaved cited fragments respond to the interview in a second voice, placing their practice within a wider field of thought on care, abstraction, and refusal.