This piece stages the body as an exhibit within a cage — fragments of limbs and flesh made soft, padded, and suspended, contained yet exposed. The cage becomes both prison and pedestal, a frame that isolates the body in a way that is both vulnerable and confrontational.

I am drawing from Francis Bacon’s use of the cage-motif: like in Three Studies of the Male Back, Bacon uses geometric structures, space frames or cage-like outlines that confine his figures, intensifying their isolation, suffering, and psychological rawness.

Similarly, Louise Bourgeois’s cages work as psychological architectures of imprisonment, protection, memory, and trauma — the cage is at once shelter and cell, a tension I explore here. The materiality of this work — sweat-wicking fabric, padded polyester, spray paint, wood — sits at the boundary of softness and rigidity, of comfort and exposure. The body in Elements is part curator, part captive. In this tension I ask: how do we witness bodies constrained yet alive? How might containment itself speak the body’s history, vulnerability, resistance?