POROUS MONUMENTS

Porous Monuments is a meditation on dwelling—not as architecture, but as a felt trace of living. Shaped by field research at ancestral Puebloan sites in the Southwest, I am drawn to what remains after inhabitation: the hollows, the soot, the eroded edges that once held breath and ritual. I create sculptural image-objects that recall fragmented dwelling structures—neither ruin nor home, but something in between. 

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This body of work treats the wall not as a flat surface, but as a vessel—an earthy skin that carries both historical time and embodied presence. Built from hand-textured layers of local earth, sand, fiber, and pigment, the surface is carved with porous openings. These forms recall traditional mud-stucco construction, reimagined as irregular cavities whose edges echo viga holes and carved alcoves in cliffside dwellings. The apertures are not merely visual; they function as memory portals—spaces where material structure yields to intimacy and reflection. Each opening offers a partial glimpse into layered historical residue: photographic transfers of fractured stone, ceremonial traces, and archival images of documents and maps.

 

In this work, I reconsider monumentality not as something grand or distant, but as something intimate and bodily. The porous openings do not assert history; they allow it to linger, quietly, in spaces shaped for dwelling. Through this, Porous Monuments asks how we might hold remembrance not through scale or spectacle, but through presence and what remains unfinished.