Speculative fiction is a powerful revolutionary tool—we won’t inhabit a brighter future if we can’t first imagine it. PORTALS is a series of sculptures designed as objects of contemplation in which the symbiotic origins of life on earth wraps around and through theoretical timeline hacking and the non-linearity of time. These sculptures are totemic offerings inviting the viewer to imagine and therefore inhabit realities in which our actions hold power against the dark futures we’ve been told are inevitable. Meditating on the symbiotic origins of all multi-celled organisms on earth further allows us a way through the collapse of toxic individualism and survival of the fittest, and into collectives of care in which the existence and contributions of humans’ many symbiotic partners are revered and celebrated on a profound scale.

Ancient sacred architecture considered doors and windows as technologies for transporting bodies into realities in which their prayers held power. Theoretical quantum physics gives us philosophical grounds to consider that all potentialities of our existence might exist simultaneously, and that the past, present and future are not only happening simultaneously, but also affect-able from the present moment. Meanwhile, our modern mythology holds that if we were to travel back in time, we would have to be careful not to effect the course of events, because any small adjustment there would have massive ramifications on the present/future. Yet we don’t pull that powerful story into our present to imagine that small changes in our present can massively shift the course of our futures.

The works are assembled from hand-crocheted textiles reflecting on humans’ capacity to transmit and inherit memories of our symbiotic origins through DNA,d salvaged objects which, through their origin or use stories, serve as keys to and amplifiers of the type of transformation each portal offers,

My work with fermentation processes and microorganisms as collaborators, both in vitro and as preserved specimens honors our lived and evolutionary symbiotic relationship with bacteria. The works further serve as methods of exploring hierarchies of power, value, and labor. Furthermore, they are an act of resistance to hard boundaries around “the self” — our bodies hold more bacterial cells and DNA than human, and research highlights the likelihood of all multi-celled organisms having evolved through symbiosis in a dance of collaborative synergy rather than brutal competition. What is “me” and “mine” when “I” is composed of so many, and when symbiosis is an essential factor in our very existence?