Split to the Bone
Sculpture / Installation
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Split to the Bone moves through questions of mortality, self-destruction, and survival, shaped by the artist’s experience of a suicide attempt at the onset of puberty. Rather than showing the body directly, the work approaches this memory in fragments, suggesting something that can’t be fully seen or held all at once. Memory here feels partial and mediated, carried through materials instead of images.

The installation brings together cast glass, velvet, and a salvaged cupboard. At its center is the image of a blood-soaked towel, standing in for bodily pain. The towel is split in two and cast in clear glass, becoming both a trace and a relic. It’s fragile, exposed, and difficult to hide. Set inside an open cabinet lined with red velvet, the piece hovers between the private and the exposed, carrying a quiet tension between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Within Three Tries: The Beginning, the work is part of a larger structure that draws on both the Stations of the Cross and Freud’s psychosexual stages. This piece aligns with Freud’s genital stage, a period tied to the emergence of sexuality, identity, and desire. Here, that stage is not smooth or cohesive, but marked by rupture, placing the body at a threshold where identity, sexuality, and survival begin to collide.

Split to the Bone treats memory as something broken into pieces, experienced in moments rather than as a single narrative. It resists spectacle, choosing instead to stay with what remains. In doing so, the work traces survival through fragments and residue, holding onto the body by showing what it leaves behind.

Photography by Getsay.