A Big Enough Bowl
2024 - now
The ongoing body of work A Big Enough Bowl initially emerged during a residency at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A Big Enough Bowl explores ideas of portability, folklore, belief, and the artist as a traveling storyteller. The entirety of these works, painted on surfaces in various sizes made from multiple paper bags, fold up to the size of a shoe box or an envelope and allow me to travel with them as I make work between home, unstable housing situations, and residencies. The works are strongly influenced by the mythology and folklore of childhood without truly belonging anywhere but the perpetually disconnected, un-belonging autistic brain. They tell stories that are both highly personal and shrouded in mystery - merely the silhouette of a narrative, accompanied by notes written in hypnagogic states or while barely paying attention, drawing from the subconscious.
In the tradition of traveling storytellers, these works play with the idea of stories appearing and disappearing, with the difference that the stories are unclear, abstract, merely the silhouette of a narrative, a vagueness like a bowl, big enough to fit the viewer’s own experience and interpretations.
A Big Enough Bowl tells an origin story for a life permeated by a sense of unbelonging. If folklore ties us to a land and a people, what kind of folklore emerges when the narrator feels such little attachment?
