I enter her studio the way I enter a field site—with attention not only to what is present, but to how it insists on being there.

Before I ask a single question, she tells me, almost apologetically, “I always think of this place as unfinished. If it starts to look resolved, I get suspicious.”

The studio bears that suspicion well. Nothing performs completion. Everything feels provisional, adjustable, in use.

Large sheets of brown paper line the walls, pinned carefully but not ceremoniously. On them, thin pencil lines describe cones, circles, long bars, repeated discs—forms that recur throughout the room. She gestures toward them and says, “These aren’t drawings in the sense of images. They’re closer to instructions—or maybe permissions.”

She explains that she draws to negotiate with material rather than to control it. “I draw until I understand what the material is willing to do,” she says. “Sometimes the drawing survives. Sometimes it disappears completely.”

When she speaks about Stiff Stiff, she does not describe it as a finished sculpture. She describes it as a process that refused to disappear.

“I didn’t want it to look decided,” she says. “I wanted the surface to remember the pressure. Not in a dramatic way—just enough that you can feel something happened.”

As she talks, she demonstrates with her hands—how the object is held, supported, carried. The gesture matters. The sculpture, as she describes it, is not displayed; it is sustained. Its pale gray surface absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Small depressions, shallow folds, fingerprints, and slight asymmetries register like pauses rather than gestures—evidence of prolonged handling rather than expressive mark-making.

As she speaks, I find myself recalling the first time I encountered Stiff Stiff in the gallery.

The space contained no voice.

What emerged instead was pressure made audible.

There was a low mechanical breath inside the sculpture—the faint scrape, the internal vibration, the sound of something working against itself. It was not a sound designed to announce presence. It was incidental, almost embarrassed by its own audibility. I heard it only by staying. Only by resisting the urge to look quickly and move on.

Only by letting explanation fall away.

Standing with the work, my position never dominated the object. I moved, adjusted, withdrew. The sound did not swell or climax. It repeated unevenly. It felt procedural rather than expressive—closer to labor than performance. More like a body regulating itself: breath held, muscle engaged, posture maintained.

Back in the studio, her words give that memory structure.

“People keep asking me what body part it is,” she says, almost amused. “But I’m not interested in anatomy. I’m interested in what happens when something tries to become stable and can’t quite do it.”

I tell her it feels like a body trained into usefulness—asked to hold weight, to behave, to stiffen.

She responds immediately: “Yes. But also trained to survive. Stiffness can be protection. It’s not always violence. Sometimes it’s strategy.”

That sentence reframes both encounters at once.

In the gallery, I had registered the sound as effort—the cost of remaining upright. The sculpture was not frozen; it was working to stay as it was. The noise marked that work. Now, in the studio, I understand that effort not as failure, but as technique.

She talks about soft architecture versus hard architecture—how permanence, dominance, and monumentality are often coded as strength, while softness and responsiveness are treated as weakness. Stiff Stiff, she explains, sits inside that contradiction: rigid in form, vulnerable in effort. It resembles infrastructure—a pipe, a fragment of a building—yet implies a body caught inside it.

The sculpture, she insists, is scaled close to the human body. Not monumental, not miniature. “I want face-to-face encounters,” she tells me. “When something becomes too big, the relationship changes. You stop negotiating with it.”

In the gallery, that negotiation had taken the form of duration. The longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the sculpture was not performing vulnerability—it was managing it. The noise was not expressive pain; it was controlled strain.

She describes the sound not as an added layer, but as a consequence. “There’s a mechanism inside,” she explains. “I like when something looks inert but is actually working.”

In retrospect, the sound functioned as an index rather than a narrative. It pointed to an internal condition without translating it. I did not “understand” the sound; I registered it. It refused metaphor while deepening meaning.

We move across the studio. Two black cylindrical forms are mounted on the wall, wired with small electronic components. They look like warning devices, instruments waiting to activate, or containers holding something invisible.

“I think a lot about hollow forms,” she says. “About things that look strong because they’re empty. Or things that are empty because they’re holding something invisible—sound, air, tension.

She tells me she is drawn to objects with openings because people instinctively want to look inside, even when there is nothing to see. Sometimes they touch. Sometimes they reach in. She doesn’t discourage it.

“I’m interested in contact,” she says. “Touch changes how people read an object.”

In the gallery, I had watched viewers hesitate, wait, lean in—uncertain whether the sculpture would respond. It never did. The sound did not adjust to attention. It persisted, indifferent. That persistence felt key.

When the conversation returns to Stiff Stiff, it is again through language rather than presence.

“The title came late,” she tells me. “I kept saying the word while working—stiff, stiff—like testing it. Repeating it made it unstable. It stopped meaning just one thing.” I ask her when she knows a work is finished. She laughs softly. “When it stops asking me for help.” Then she adds, “When it can hold its own tension without me fixing it.”

That idea—holding tension—echoes throughout the studio. In the wire-frame wall structures that cradle drawings like fragile evidence. In the cluster of black cones on the floor that look identical until you notice their slight variations. In the long metal form with conical ends that seems unsure whether it wants to project outward or draw inward.

In the gallery, the sculpture never resolved. The sound did not stop. The object remained in the same posture, neither triumphant nor broken. It did not collapse. It did not rebel. It continued.

She talks about minimalism, about how geometric reduction often reads as control or masculinity. “People ask me why the work feels masculine,” she says. “As if permanence belongs to men.” She is suspicious of neutrality, of objects that claim purity or resolution too easily.

What interests her instead is effort—the cost of maintaining form.

As we talk, I share pieces of my own practice—not as parallel claims, but as points of contact. I tell her about my interest in how objects manage visibility, how bodies are translated into systems, how documentation often flattens what is ethically complex.

She listens closely and says, “I think we’re both suspicious of clarity. Of things that explain themselves too fast.”

That suspicion lives inside Stiff Stiff. The sculpture does not resolve into metaphor. It does not offer a clean reading. Instead, it holds its contradictions quietly: softness and rigidity, fragility and endurance, care and constraint.

Before I leave, she says something that feels like the quiet thesis of the studio.

“I don’t want my work to dominate the room. I want it to adjust the way the room is felt.”

Walking out, I realize that Stiff Stiff does exactly that. It doesn’t demand attention. It alters posture. It slows looking. It asks the viewer to feel pressure—sometimes remembered, sometimes present—without spectacle.

The studio remains behind me, but the sensation stays—not as a conclusion, as a method I will return to.