Forms representing my body, my partners’ bodies, my family’s bodies; forms floating on an ocean’s surface: forms mangled and tangled back together into a body of shoulders, ankles, and kneecaps: these were some of my imaginations when developing this series. This collection explores the human brain’s desire to find forms out of surfaces and bodies out of those forms. These works are composed of collections of fragile bands cradled together with wood pulp and linseed oil to recreate our skin enwrapping bone, tissue, and cartilage. Deciduous heartwoods offer the tonal similarities to our skin that kindle our brain’s object-recognition processing and build a lasting illusion that these works are not just wood, but relative bodies. This innate processing is an implicit human language of visual association. In this series, I sculpt abstractions of exposed forms that are intended to use this language to communicate to viewers that there is a living pulse within the works, beating “I am a body.”