Detail from previous collaboration with Walker Tufts, Dirt Bath, 2021.

Together with Walker Tufts, as Dirty Time, I’ll be producing some installations and experiences through the Goethe-Institut Boston’s “Studio 170” artist residency program in June 2022 that build on collaborative project of ours at ARoS in 2021.

We take our project’s title, Autolysis (self-splitting), from the name for the first stage of decomposition when a body is buried, and from the Greek roots of that word. Autolysis is a poetic and visceral exploration of issues around climate change, plant species adaptation/extinction, and personal mortality through a focus on/engagement with soil/dirt.

Dirt/earth is the very base of our daily existence and also where we return to when we cease to exist. It nurtures us, and then we disappear into it.

In the Covid-era, when we have become profoundly oriented towards the digital, and where cleanliness has felt like a life or death imperative, Autolysis offers an immersive, tactile and olfactory experience of re-connection with the earth and to dirt.

Autolysis also opens conversations about personal relationships with the earth in a way that emphasizes the actual material of the earth rather than earth with a capital “E”, and creates space for gentle contemplation of end of life/end of species issues.

See this flyer for event dates and open studio hours! More event details here.