Sculpture & Sensorial Machines
Amygdala
Rescued leather, hand dyed and manipulated silk, drift wood, metal, and memory.
This towering, immersive sculpture evokes the amygdala—the deep brain structure where fear, trauma, and memory reside. Forms swell and tunnel like cavernous brain folds, their interiors lined with shimmer, scar, and densely layered textiles—stained, stitched, and stretched into place. The entire structure pulses with psychological architecture: a visceral mapping of stored emotion, involuntary response, and bodily remembering.
Constructed from salvaged materials—driftwood dragged from shorelines, hand-dyed silk, and rescued leather—Amygdala is sewn, bound, and tensioned into a form that feels both anatomical and mythic. Silk suggests neural tissue; leather folds echo skin, scar, and containment; wood arcs and curves like vascular scaffolding or distorted gray matter.
A convex surveillance mirror lies partially shrouded within the structure—its curved surface catching glimpses of reflection, subtly distorting the bodies of those who enter its space. Viewers are no longer merely looking at the sculpture; they are drawn into it—mirrored, implicated, and spatially folded into its architecture. Like the amygdala itself, the mirror sits quietly at the core, processing, recalling, protecting.
Amygdala is not a literal brain—but an emotional chamber, a fear cathedral, a vestibule of memory made flesh. It stands as both a warning and a witnessing—a threshold for what the body cannot forget.