Strong Hearts and Strong Hands

After college, I secured a $25,000 grant and used it to travel across the country, volunteering at elder care facilities and completing portraits of residents. In order to confront our cultural aversion to interaction with aging bodies, the final installation includes large-scale images wired with individual speakers and suspended from the ceiling to allow for subtle movement. After processing the portraits using a combination of letterpress and encaustic techniques, I mounted them to raw hand-stretched canvas and used beeswax to skin the work as a whole. This presentation allows the viewer to interact with unpredictably vocal, tactile subjects, and invites the viewer to reconsider the negative interactions we often associate with the aging human presence.