Choreography

Because of my background in geophysics, Earth processes are something I connect to how I understand my identity. I tend to anthropomorphize volcanoes, so it’s fascinating to me that they pre-date and exist outside of human concepts of gender. I am inspired by volcanoes’ ability to contain multiple, even opposing characteristics. They both create and destroy. They can be explosive, fluid, and brittle. I also relate to volcanoes through elements of longing, eg. the stratovolcano just biding time until its next eruption.

Within this piece I explore the power of volcanoes, but also how we can’t perceive the full complexities of them. I experience tension between feeling grounded in who I am but untethered in how and to what degree I am perceived by others. Disorientation in feeling that I’m seen as one thing when I’m actually multiple. To me this is similar to our current understanding of volcanoes. Despite research, there is so much more about volcanic processes that we aren’t able to detect, predict, or explain.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world, “What Happened After” is an exploration of relationships amongst the chaos of both personal and societal conflicts as three strangers navigate the tensions brought on through witnessing the destruction of everything that was familiar.

This section was made in collaboration with Nikita Rabbitt.

This piece is a science fiction interpretation of what could happen if we did nothing to stop climate change and reached the point of civilization collapse. It begins with a group navigating shifting social structures and an increasingly hostile environment and finishes more on the fiction side of science fiction, with the experiences of a pair of siblings hundreds of years later as something mysterious is released from the melting ice caps.

A jökulhlaup is a type of glacial flood. Meltwater builds up underneath a glacier until the water pressure becomes too great for the ice to hold it back causing an abrupt outpouring of water from the glacier.

In this piece I explored a physical environment as a way of depicting my exploration and thoughts surrounding what gender is, and what gender means to me.

This is an excerpt of a larger piece that explores human nature and its contradictions. I am fascinated by human nature because it is so paradoxical. In this section of the piece, I focused on how humans relate to the environment. Many of our actions harm the world we live on, but due to how natural systems are set up, the harm we cause will eventually be returned to us unless we change our relationship to the environment.