In Sticky, I am fascinated in this awkward, particular and distorted union of organic and inorganic objects. For example, at 480 lbs, 40-year-old Gayle Grinds spent six years on the couch without getting up. When paramedics came to help her with a breathing problem, they realized her skin had grafted to the burgundy and gray couch. This woman literally became one with the couch; her skin was so thoroughly intertwined with the fabric that she had to be surgically removed.
I use Marshmallow Fluff and its dense, gelatinous consistency to help create the union between the natural and the inert by its metamorphisizing and overwhelming the human and object into one. Marshmallow Fluff becomes a metaphor for human skin because it demonstrates similar qualities such as the suppleness and adaptability. Skin is tight across the palm, thick on the soles of the feet and yet it is also thin and flexible on the eyelid. Marshmallow Fluff is thick and gooey when it first comes out of the jar; as gravity pulls it down, it warms and oozes creating additional limbs; and when left untouched over the body, it mimics and fossilizes the skin.
The Marshmallow Fluff environment created in my photographs becomes a place where whatever you touch becomes a part of you, swallowing you up and blurring the distinction between human and object. The figure slightly surfaces from the object allowing a hint or aura visible, but then melts back into the object. Using this artificial, sticky, substance to create this unnatural act, the human form is exaggerated, creating a new, visceral creature, neither human nor object, but a distortion of both.
