Wallach Gallery, NYC
April - May 2023
Made in collaboration and with support from:
Alison Siegel, Elena Dudum, Kassia Karras, Char Jeré, Andrew Brehm, Shelly Silver, Nicola López, Sable Elyse Smith, Orlee Malka, Eddie Bartolomei, Jon Kessler, The Columbia Makerspace, Cody O’Ferrall, Bill Miller, Columbia shop team, Sarah Tortora, Rebekah Birkan, Jon Waites, JJ Peet, Kristen Lueck, Laura Mosquera, Madison Seely, Devin Lloyd, Ethan Fudge. Image credits: Anthony Maule, Alan Weiner, Char Jeré
Cella, Hanging structure of steel, silk, assorted plastics and bioplastic, 8x8x11’ 

Cella is the latin word for small room. It is also provides the source of the word for a biological cell.

Cella has a sheltering shape. The dome form is old, recalling yurts: portable circular dwellings used in Asia for over 3000 years. The curved armature is like some combination of the evenly spaced decorative geometries of a greenhouse, combined with the awkward protective legs of the spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois. Both provide protection for growth within, but bring up questions of care and constriction, freedom and control.

She is made up of smaller parts. As with vegetal structures, such as female pinecones, folded scales or bracts are positioned in relation to one another without gaps to receive the most sunlight. The hard-shelled woody case of a female pinecone serves also to protect its seeds. Like an armor – an interlocking phalanx of shields forming a wall through which a mass of spears points to the enemy - there is protection in numbers. The whole works together to form a secure, protective unit over the structure. What kind of positive or negative domination can be achieved through this tactic of collective defense?

Her opening and closing mirrors the seed-bearing pinecone’s ability to respond to changes in humidity: “scales gape open when it is dry, releasing the cone’s seeds… when it is damp the scales close up”. She is fertile, a being in tune with her natural cycles. She ebbs and flows with the changes in her environment, allowing her seeds to have the best chance at survival.  











CLEA RSKY Gallery
Coxsackie, NY, 2022

Curated by Juan Hernandez and Noga Cohen


Soil Murmurs
Soil, acrylic containers, metal pipes, mirror, circuits, phone, amp & silk.

Soil Murmurs was an installation and sound performance conducted by myself and collaborator Char Jeré in upstate NY.  The containers hold soil samples from the land just outside the spaceship dome. We listened and harmonized with it back inside the lab.

Photo credit: Ben Salesse






2021-2022
Various outdoor locations
Nesting

This project was collective and multiple in scope. With a simple gesture of re-creating a human-scale nest, it asks: where is home? Where and to whom are we responsible? How can we learn from other animal architectures and instincts?

Today, when climate change has started to have very real impacts for many with water level rise, and extreme and volatile temperature variation, not to mention viral threats, the idea of building with porosity in mind can feel frightening. Disorder has been taken out of the design. Our structures seem unable to breathe, the boundary between inside and out thoroughly guarded with energy-guzzling air conditioning units or heaters.

There is, however, potential to reimagine our homes; we can perhaps learn from other creatures and how they create security for themselves and cope with uncertainty.







Nests offer an interesting example, as they have a “certain chemistry — an alchemy, almost. From humble parts, a greater sum emerges and coheres.”(Siobhan Roberts, NYT) This construction is potentially widely applicable to structures in architecture, which some researchers at the University of Chicago have called aleatory architecture, offering a counter to traditional “architecture’s prejudices for totalizing order and control.”

In Latin, alea refers to dice or gambling; they are asking whether design could arise from disorder. Features of aleatory architecture include simple structures and achieving self confinement through interlocking elements or entanglement. These structures are made relatively quickly, are easy to disassemble and can be easily recycled and reused. The structures hold an aesthetic beauty in their form and construction. I am interested in home ecologies and designs that incorporate chance, that are porous, and that do not deny the inherent unknowns of the outdoors.


Lenfest Center for the Arts
2022
Absent
Laser cut into birch wood, 86x45", 2022


Chashama Gallery
Summer Show 2022
NYC
Holding 
84x22’’
Algae Bioplastic, Pressed Flowers and Thread, 2022

Photo credit: Elisheva Gavra



© Meaghan Elyse Lueck 2023