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Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Patrick Stochmal

i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)

Sculpture
2024
Vermicompost (Eisenia Fetida worms, weekly food scraps, my collected hair, nail clippings, and used tissues, leaf litter and dirt from sites of intimate queer encounters, a pair of my old underwear, love letters written to former lovers and the hidden sites of our intimate encounters, local newspaper articles from my hometown, dried flowers from my parents wedding bouquet), petri dish, nutrient agar infused with my blood, vermicompost bacteria culture, vermicompost tea, acrylic plastic, plywood
19.5" x 13" x 21"
(Traversing the obscene, residing in the cracks of negation and absence that is death, there shimmers forth what may be called life... not procreation, not reproduction, but a life as death that infects and animates bodies... leaking in, spilling out, intimacy is perhaps the threat of contamination)Accruing together as a contingent, provisional and entangled ecosystem-body, this temporally mutating corpus indexes leaky encounters between embodiments, experiences, places and matter while resisting the temptation of absolute capture. Using composting as a framework for considering the cultivation of more-than-human kinships to politicize domestic economies/relationships beyond the human sphere, I create a strange incubator or bioreactor of sorts. The structure facilitates the incubation of my non-human kin, bearing the traces of fraught yet loving relations and ghostly intimacies. The dimensions of the bioreactor correspond to average measurements of a newborn baby's height (length) and a calculated average of cranial/pelvic circumference (width).

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i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
i love you (a provisional body, a provisional home)
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2024, GradEx
OCAD University

Work by

Patrick Stochmal

Sculpture/Installation

“Coming from places of intimate encounters that are hidden (laying beneath dirt and logs, caressing the underbellies of upturned leaves, gleaming forth from detritus that does not belong) our queer...” [More]