building up my bones

2010. 35mm. digital scans.

“…The dwelling loses its minor detail—windows, siding, and roof tiles—to become a rough papery mass of white that engulfs the figure. The lot is the former site of an abandoned house, now demolished, that served as a sacred place of solitude and inspiration for the artist in their youth. Just as the prints are like cels of an animation, the tiles are fragments of a single coherent phrase. Through their small act of destruction, Lambi rebuilds and memorializes the house, a place whose haunting they feel in their very bones."
- Mark Drummond Davis, exhibition review for “Sacred=Art” in Artscope Magazine, May/June 2010*

from 2006-2009 (when i was roughly 17-20) i spent a lot of time creating inside an abandoned house at the end of my street. in 2009 it was condemned, and the fire department used it as practice, burning it down and collapsing it into its foundation.

shortly after, i made a tapestry to resemble the house, including sewn-on photographs from inside some of the rooms. i returned to house’s site (with my close friend Jess, who i’d collaborated with there many times), wrapped her in the tapestry, and took several portraits of her. the jars at her side are filled with ash/burnt wood that we collected. i developed and printed the photos, and peeled away the paper from one of them—recreating the house in the negative space, digitally scanning the photo at various points in the process.

this work was way of honoring the house; contemplating what it means to be held by a space, for that space to be there/not there; and processing the loss of the physical walls within which i truly began to explore my creative identity.

building

*this quote is edited to reflect my pronouns and last name, which have changed since its publication.