Cautionary Tails

Cautionary Tails (2025), rope, water chestnut seed pods, acrylic paint, electrician tape, 24” x 24” x 100”

Suspended from the branches of trees on the campus of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Upstate New York, my woven sculptures Cautionary Tails and Trees and Fire (both 2025) incorporate a variation of the Andean khipu—an ancient Inca record-keeping system made of knotted strings. To create these works, I tied colorful rope around small found objects—children’s toys and toy-sized water chestnut seed pods—interweaving domestic and natural memories.

The woven form of Cautionary Tails—a dense, round object weighing approximately 70 pounds—evokes a planetary mass or an oversized, vibrant tassel. Brown, spiked water chestnut seed pods—sometimes called “devil’s heads”—are knotted into the sculpture’s trailing strands, resembling an asteroid shower caught in orbit. Water chestnuts are highly invasive in Upstate New York, and their seed pods, often found along railways and urban pathways, point to the complexity of describing “place” amid climate crisis and globalization. This work continues my sculptural exploration of the vortex, using it as an abstract framework to consider what it means to be local in a globalized world.