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The Wake of the Body

2025

In my practice, the body is not a fixed form but a site of continual inscription—an entity that writes and erases itself as it moves through space. I approach the body through its morphology: uprightness, symmetry, weight, and inevitable fragility. What draws me most, however, are the traces that emerge not from dramatic gestures, but from quiet, repeated contact between body and surface.

This work extends that inquiry by placing my body in direct contact with steel, a material chosen for its coldness, permanence, and resistance. Walking barefoot across the metal with water on my feet becomes a simple action that produces a complex record. Each step lands, presses, evaporates, and disappears, leaving only a temporary darkened imprint before fading. The surface remembers—but only briefly.

Within this cycle of appearance and disappearance, the body becomes both agent and residue, marking the surface while being shaped by it in return. The work holds tension between the durability of steel and the fleeting vulnerability of the wet footprint. What remains visible is never the body itself, but its afterimage—a momentary wake that lingers between presence and loss.

By foregrounding this ephemeral trace, the piece asks how bodies occupy space, how they are registered, and how they are forgotten. Walking becomes a quiet form of inscription, suggesting that existence is often recorded not through dramatic presence, but through small, vanishing gestures that nonetheless insist: I was here.