Each watercolour in Cocoon is inhabited by a lone female figure who seems to be enacting a banal, private performance for the self—as if in thrall to the objects that surround and threaten to overtake her. Rendered in a near-monochrome palette of blues and greens, the crowded spaces take on a fluid dreamlike quality, as if revealing layers of their occupants’ subconsciousness through their accumulations of personally significant dross.
Unlike the spate of recent television shows and memoirs about hoarding that sensationalize or pathologize “aberrant object conduct,” the Cocoon series offers a sensitive glimpse of hoarding as a life lived in agonizing detail, a hunger that knows 3 no bounds. Balancing delicacy and frankness, her depictions of material deviance open a space of queer object relations that leaves room for tenderness, attachment, and dignity.
