This work engages directly with the boundaries of home, where my experiences and understandings of the severity of changing climate conditions is framed and mediated through various discrete exposures to heat, smoke, and water. In 2021, 1 in 10 homes in the US (nearly 15 million homes) were impacted by climate change, causing an estimated $56.92 billion in property damage.

In thinking about my own experience of home, I made an installation of flame shaped nightlights, titled, for those that would sleep. The flames are made of cast porcelain and they are meant to resemble fire icons, installed in a series of outlets that have been arranged to mimic a wildfire map of California. The piece was a response to a moment that passed a few years ago during a particularly impactful fire season. I was sitting with my 4-year-old and trying to speak honestly about why we couldn’t go outside and why we have towels shoved under the doors and shrink wrap around the windows. While the architectural response to climate change has been guided by a rubric of sustainability, efficiency, and fortification—things like hurricane ties, impervious membranes, and added insulation—I wanted to make something that spoke to the complicated and fraught space at the intersection of home, body, and environment. I wanted the flames to read like the icons on a map, but also like the cheap night lights that you buy from amazon with same-day shipping. I think of these as mapping the treacherous territory between physical comfort, and the often destructive, consumptive behaviors that structure middle class, domestic life under late capitalism. The materiality of the nightlights is meant to reference the British imperial and colonial legacies that cherished the translucent strength, stability, and whiteness of porcelain, while evoking a map, and a wall erupting in flames. It is precisely the process of mapping that colonial forces rely on to enact and enforce agendas of extraction and exploitation. Reflecting on the chincy, consumable, designer-y look of the nightlights, I titled the piece, for those that would sleep. The phrase is borrowed from Theodore Adorno’s essay “Commitment”, wherein he addresses the false binary between aesthetic objects and art committed to political ideals. As climate driven events continue to create unfamiliar landscapes, products like sand bags that preserve the familiar, begin to take on the form of comfort objects like husband pillows, decorative pillows and stuffed animals.