Through Obscurity: Attuning to the Everyday, Vancouver BC, 2026
Emily Carr University of Art and Design, MFA Thesis Exhibition

The current phenomenon of inattentional blindness from digital overload, mental distraction, and daily habituation results in missing nuanced encounters within human-to-human and more-than-human spaces.  What we don’t pay attention to is shrouded in obscurity: not easily perceived or readily understood.  Through Obscurity questions our habitual ways of approaching daily life, asking: What do we look at but not see?  Looking is not just a physical, sensorial observation, but also a philosophical practise that involves attunement.

I use clay as both a malleable material and a fragile installation medium through which the somatic attunement required in the artistic process mirrors the psychological attunement in everyday interactions and surroundings that this project calls for.  Attuning to touch through the lens of feminist physicist Karen Barad introduces a micro space between hand and material resulting from the repellent nature of electrons preventing actual direct contact with other atoms. The finely pointed exercise of attunement – to bring into harmony – requires sensitive curiosity and shrewd responsiveness to subtle aspects of intra-action that permeate this micro space between two entities.

Through the tool of abstraction, this project plays with tensions between soft pliability to rigid fragility, emptiness to fullness, and animacy to permanency alongside material associations with textiles (looping, threading, weaving, draping, wrapping).  The works in this exhibition began in diverse ways: some as observations about domestic encounters, others as biomorphic forms from the geologic underworld and ecological biosphere, many inspired by feminist, philosophical and ecological scholars, and all inviting imaginative participation and uniquely situated responses.