Abstract
Sometimes, when immersed in a place of ineffable lightness that hovers on the boundary between solidity and dispersion like dense fog, I find myself taking on the liminal qualities of the space around me. The laws of physics seem to lose their potency and, with my newly distorted sense of vision, I understand myself and my relationship to the world around me more in terms of my haptic and tactile senses. This feeling of suddenly inhabiting a new place, one in which metaphors contain more truth than do direct descriptions, mirrors that of being engrossed in a story. Throughout my life, I have developed my sense of self from the spatially unique places I physically inhabit and the fictional narratives I read. For me, both create immersive worlds whose phenomenological natures give me new insight into myself. They remind me of the subject/object duality of embodied experience: with my body I perceive and interact with the world around me, while at the same time my body is an object whose physical characteristics are defined in comparison to my surroundings. I investigate this paradox by creating immersive spaces of my own. I build my installations from small multiples whose rhythmic repetition and spatial arrangement create the emotional tone of the environment. The physical and connotative properties of the materials also describe the conceptual content. My hope is that the character of these materials and their haptic arrangements can create spatial metaphors for emotional states.