In November 2024, following Trump’s reelection, I created Sculpture To Hide My Head In with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Hiding—absurdly, like the proverbial ostrich—in a sculpture of my own making felt strangely appropriate. DADA, after all, was born out of the fear and disillusionment of the Great War. I felt a deep kinship with those artists who turned to the irrational and nonsensical in an attempt to push back against the oppressive politics of their time.

Sculpture To Hide My Head In (2024) and its follow-up, Sculpture To Hide My Head In 2 (2025), are constructed from papier-mâché and mounted on stainless steel carts—evocative of bodies on dissecting tables. My performative interaction with these works, along with their photographic documentation, is integral to the pieces. The photographs stand as artworks in their own right. The organic forms of these sculptures recall earlier works of mine that draw inspiration from the human body, such as Uvula Arch (2023) and The Semi Circular Sculpture (2023).

In 2023, I revisited my early practice through my exhibition Past Is Prologue at 325 Project Space in Ridgewood, Queens. This show featured drawings and sculptures from the 1980s and led me to reexamine unrealized ideas from that period. One such idea became Uvula Arch, a seven-foot-high papier-mâché sculpture inspired by the uvula in the human throat. Designed to be walked through like the gaping mouth of a mythological creature, the piece feels at once stately and absurd—a biomorphic portal that flirts with theatricality. I envision it scaled up to the grandeur of a triumphal arch.

The Semi Circular Sculpture (2023) was inspired by the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which govern our sense of balance. Its human-scale dimensions create a visceral relationship with the viewer, and its shifting form encourages movement, evoking a sense of disorientation. The white, circular shapes also echo the later works of Jean Arp—a DADA and surrealist sculptor whose influence I deeply respect.

Other bodily structures—like the stapes bone of the inner ear and the aortic arch of the heart—continue to inspire my sculptures and large-scale charcoal studies. Aorta Arch, like Uvula Arch, is conceived as a monumental passageway. Though I’ve only completed a maquette and a large drawing, these give a strong impression of its intended scale and presence.