voice box

installation, 2019

Projected top-down onto the floor in a dark room, the human larynx, also known as the voice box, opens and closes to my own distorted speech.

Just as eyes are often regarded as the windows to the soul, I feel a voice functions similarly. As I passed through the years closely following the onset of puberty, I struggled with questioning whether my voice was still my own. We often don’t give voice a physical form when we think of it, even though it comes from a very physical object inside of us. By magnifying the voice’s bodily source onto the floor and mapping my own speech to its contractions, Voice Box is both haunting and comforting for me. It gives a central dysphoria of my adolescence a physical space to inhabit — and I with it.