Series
Shrines to Nature, 2020 - ongoing, led by Yevgenia Davidoff
The shrine works begin in the domestic realm, where care is learned through ordinary acts of routine labor, maintenance, and attention. Washing, arranging, feeding, cleaning, lighting, repairing, tending: these repeated gestures may seem minor, but they form the first structures through which empathy becomes embodied. Care is not only an emotion here. It is a practice, a discipline, a muscle.
In the work, this care manifests through close observation of humble plants, the slow casting of cement, the tedious and highly detailed painting of botanical imagery on glass, and the thoughtful rearrangement of forms. Many of the cement elements are cast from single-use food packaging, preserving the ribs, cavities, and structural traces of disposable consumer culture. By repeatedly casting these packaging molds, I repeat the repetition already embedded in them: the cycles of use, disposal, purchase, storage, feeding, cleaning, and return. This endless return of ordinary gestures becomes the condition through which ritual begins to work.
Built from cast cement, painted glass, light, and found household objects, the shrines transform domestic materials into small architectures of attention. The works propose that the intimate rituals of the home can become models for larger forms of responsibility. The same habits that teach us to care for a child, a meal, a plant, a room, or a fragile object may also shape how we care for communities, ecosystems, and the more-than-human world. Domestic labor, often dismissed as invisible or secondary, becomes a philosophical and ecological foundation.
