Gentlest Gesture

Gentlest Gesture is a wire-mesh frame sakura branch over which I cultivated crystals. The Mylar blossoms are attached to and activated by an exposed muscle wire circuit. Muscle wire is a tiny hair-thin wire that has been treated with various metals and acts very much like a bio muscle, contracting when a current is sent through it. The effect is that the blossom gently moves, a motion somewhere between opening/closing and twitching.

Overall the sense of this work is meant to be one of optimism, transformation, and mystery. A springtime bike ride through Karuisawa, Japan, and Neruda’s book of poems Stones of the Sky influenced this work. I was attempting to imagine climate change and its effect on the landscape positively. When Neruda was dying of cancer, he wrote of the body transforming from flesh into crystals, into jewels. It is a geologic look at death as not an end but a prolonged transition into something more beautiful.