Cosmic Cave: How It Came to Be
Cosmic Cave (Going into The Unknown to Find Everything We Thought We Knew) is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of work. When I was first conceptualizing this piece, COVID-19 hadn’t yet made its way around the world. At that time, I was interested in The Unknown—how we collectively respond to it, what meanings we attach to it, and how it can affect the rest of our lives. Jungian Shadow Theory and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey complemented my study of The Unknown, and led me to these notions: we don’t truly know what we think we know, the parts of our selves and our truths we fail to acknowledge will govern us until we see and accept them, and finding the light requires delving deep into darkness and tribulation. These threads feel even more pertinent as we stand in the midst of a pandemic, a fraught election year, and mass social reckonings.
Initial concept sketch and ideas for what Cosmic Cave might look like, 2019
At the beginning of this project, systemic issues—such as police brutality, income inequality, inadequate healthcare and education—very much existed, but were less articulated in the public sphere. COVID brings our systems and psyches into sharper focus. There is a looming dissonance as many in power declare the pandemic over, or have shared only tepid responses or advanced false information. Summer’s last stretch sees many folks attempting to resume their Before Times activities even as death tolls continually rise. Pulling back the curtain reveals our society’s white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal underpinnings, but trying to soften or censor what is there will not make it go away. We cannot afford to close the curtain or aim to resume “normalcy,” return to what we thought once was. We have to sit with this moment, converse with it, get to know why all of it—including our sense of selves—exists in the first place. Take from it what we can. Decide what is collectively worth striving toward. Cosmic Cave’s small, intimate descent into The Unknown translates to a socially-distant, internet-mediated experience that feels more rich and of this moment than I could have ever anticipated.
Interior View of Cosmic Cave maquette, 2019
In order to physically reflect this feeling of delving into the unfamiliarly familiar, I thought about what The Unknown exists as. Deep sea and underground caverns and far-off cosmos are not fully understood, but they share similar characteristics: vastness, material, and mythology. What’s of the earth is also of the stars. Thus, I imagined a space that morphed the earthly and the cosmic, bathed in darkness but also cool, glittery, colorful light.
The materials I built Cosmic Cave with reflect personal Knowns and Unknowns. Much of my work incorporates repetition, craft supplies, and paper products. Until Cosmic Cave, none of it included chicken wire or building a fully immersive piece. The cave blobs required me to experiment and adapt: form the chicken wire and let it do as it does, then fortify it with cardboard, paper mache, and brown paper bags. Go over it again with a couple more layers of paper mache. Pay attention to each blob’s particulars and do what was needed to make it a stable base for hundreds of paper flowers.
Building the first layers of some blobs with my studio assistants, 2020
The blobs themselves existed in a state of flux. Hanging one over another on the walls in my studio, I darted from one to another, gluing flowers, hot glue gun trailed by an extension cord. I sometimes had difficulty reconciling my first impression of the room at the Riffe with the measurements taped down on my floors and the familiarity of the blobs on my walls. Would they be adequate for the space? Is Cosmic Cave going to feel cave-like? My maquette told me it would be fine, but my unknowing was loud, especially as Ohio’s COVID lockdown swept in.
The realities of COVID and the immersive experimentation of Cosmic Cave were balanced by the certainty of making multiples. I cut thousands of flowers and hundreds of stars by hand, assembling each one uniquely. Hours and hours of labor went into that process, stretching from the very beginning of my work on Cosmic Cave to the final touches in the gallery. They represent time spent waiting for paper mache blobs to dry. They represent the nights I was too tired from my COVID-era service work job to do anything other than sit and make a pile of small, particular, familiar bits of art. I’ve used paper and pipe cleaners and pom-poms most of my life; there’s a comfort to that experience and a wonder in seeing how it can evolve.
Hand-cut flower parts in a gallon-size bag…I went through many, many gallon-size bags of flower parts, 2020
Installing Cosmic Cave in the middle of July, in the state gallery, in the midst of COVID and protests after George Floyd’s murder adds many particularities to this experience. Four days and over seventy hours of labor went into installing Cosmic Cave, brought forth by multiple gallery assistants, my mother, and myself. It was a beautiful, immersive experience that I am still processing, but some anecdotes stand out in my mind.
All thirteen of the blobs, laying outside of the room, waiting to bring Cosmic Cave to life, 2020
Driving into Columbus was easier than it had ever been in the Before Times. Traffic to and from downtown was scant. With the gallery situated across from the State House, we looked out onto a quiet, boarded up square. We stayed in the gallery, socially distanced, for six hours each day. In the throes of install, time felt compressed but also like it would go on forever. Seeing all of the blobs laid out on the gallery floor made me realize just how big they were. The pastel rainbow was the most arduous element—it took three days and layers and layers of paint to glow atop the black background. I thought I shook out all of the tulle’s loose glitter at home, but it still had a bunch that rained down as I looped the yards back and forth, back and forth across the room. I glued nearly every star and flower on the tulle during install, which included a lot of laps around the room on top of a ladder, watching out for errant hot glue drops giving way to gravity.
Day Two of installation, gluing flowers and stars to the tulle cloud ceiling, 2020
Seeing all of the blobs hung on the walls made me cry. Standing in the middle of Cosmic Cave, feeling the quiet, watching the light bounce from glitter to holographic paper to cellophane was magical. Knowing Cosmic Cave exists in this time frame, in this particular exhibit makes me proud. I am the only artist from Dayton, I am one of the youngest, and I have the largest work. All of the time, hot glue burns, sore fingers, and uncertainties have given forth to something beautiful. There’s light in the darkness.
Finished interior view of Cosmic Cave (Going into The Unknown to Find Everything We Thought We Knew), 2020
