Pulmonary Organs 1-6

2026

Oxygen tubing, red thread, cheesecloth, portable oxygen concentrator.

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Oxygen tubing is designed to become invisible while it is in use it becomes part of the everyday routine of keeping someone alive. Once contaminated with human waste, it is replaced.

When my grandma passed away due to end stage COPD she gathered a bag of her used breathing tubes with the intention for me to make an artwork out of it one day. Resurrecting this clinical material for a purpose it wasn't built for allowed its dormant pre-existing memory of a function to re-seed itself.

Each iteration of this dynamic installation starts and ends with this material and as such I have been colloquially referring to each sculpture as organs. While this work begins with the loss of my grandma, it spotlights the often hidden realities of medical intervention. Its shift from clinically functional into material memory in this work creates a visual conversation around palliative care and its slow intimacy in end stage capitalism. It asks how objects can become archives of care, and how making can become a way of processing grief while inviting others to reflect on their own experiences of illness, loss and remembrance. The clinical materially driven aspects of this work sit in parallel with that of spirit and soul, a line that is commonly walked in palliative care. In a way this work and the journey towards its completion serves as a living real archive of the ways I have been moving through loss and grief.