INFRUCTESCENCE

Abstract

INFRUCTESCENCE is a multimedia sculptural thesis that weaves personal memory, mythic narrative, and material poetics into an exploration of hunger—bodily, emotional, ancestral, and cosmic. Rooted in Knox’s rural Tennessee upbringing, the work spirals outward from the intimate image of a slug inside a green bell pepper into a larger meditation on containment, desire, and transformation. Slugs and shadows recur as symbolic agents of vulnerability and boundary, echoing themes of metamorphosis and mythic punishment. Sculptural forms become vessels of narrative, protected and imprisoned by salt, a material both preservative and destructive.Blending ceramic sculpture, text, and performance, INFRUCTESCENCE imagines a descent into an otherworldly realm where characters like Hades, Eve, and a many-eyed slug navigate a maze of hunger, memory, and myth. Through these figures and their encounters—comical, tragic, surreal—the installation investigates the limits of the body and the self, and the moments in which transformation becomes inevitable. Salt maps the psychic terrain between protection and isolation. Ceramic forms stand as guardians, remnants, and containers for unseen forces. Drawing from the botanical term infructescence—a cluster of fruits where once flowers bloomed—the work proposes that what remains after longing, trauma, or desire is not absence, but residue: thick with memory, ripe with story. At its core, INFRUCTSECENCE is a sculptural poem about the hunger that shapes us, the boundaries that break around us, and the mythic echoes that carry us home.