Spirals of pleated black fabric wound across the floor around a ladder wrapped floor to top in black cloth, paired with a black-and-white panel of hand-drawn spirals and circles. Spiral was made as a tribute to people living with and lost to HIV/AIDS, and to those who support and educate around the disease – created for the Cascade AIDS Project in 2012.
The form came out of a period spent studying Indian Tantric art, where spirals and center points are painted as a contemplative practice – simple repeated marks, meant to be recalled through the day to re-enter a state of meditation. I started drawing my own spirals daily, and the practice became the foundation for the piece.
Over months of drawing, the spiral turned into three things for me at once. A meditation, in the drawing itself. A metaphor, with the center point standing in for stillness, a beginning, or an end, and the line around it for contraction and expansion, introspection and growth. And a map – I could look back at a given day’s spiral and remember what had shaped it: who I’d been with, what state I was in, where I’d landed on the line.
The installation scaled that practice up to a size someone could walk into – a spiral wide enough to stand inside, with the wrapped ladder at its center as the fixed point everything else moved around.
Cascade Aids Project, 2012
