second life is an homage to the mussel shell, celebrating the beauty and the delicacy of the form with its pale and vivid indigo hues and iridescent surfacing. It is important to note that these particular shells have a history. My partner buried mussel and oyster shells in our urban garden around trees and shrubs, not far below the surface. Shells provide calcium and nutrients to the roots of plants—that said, he missed a step as you need to grind the shells. After close to 15 years below ground, and me coming out of a period of grieving (how to make art after death), I excavated the shells to find their patinated fragility precariously beautiful and uplifting. I worked with the mussel shells first in the photographic works acts of dissent prior to this kinetic sculpture. The process and intentionality around giving the shells a "second life" involving motion is thoughtfully captured in this excerpt from Bojana Videkanic's exhibition essay: 

"Far from objectifying her materials, Andison painstakingly works with the shells through a meticulous and thoughtful process, in some instances bending to their will (coming up with elaborate and complicated ways to work with the fragile material to retain its natural characteristics). The artist acquiesced that she cannot create a certain kind of work as the material would not let her. Both the shells and the accompanying kinetic system that makes the sculpture move, rest on an intricate equilibrium of moving parts, electromotors, sensors, and software. Therefore, just like in nature, shell shield and second life are sensitive ecosystems resting on a balance between interconnected parts which live in a symbiotic relationship. Anything can go wrong at any time: machine parts could stop working, sensors could refuse to obey the software, and shells could move out of place. Precarity abounds. Yet, this mirroring of fragile natural processes in a complex artistic system, points to how vulnerability is also nature’s greatest strength. It is because relationships in nature are so precarious that its various elements (flora, fauna, organic and inorganic materials, and of course humans) must rely on each other to survive, they are what physicist Karen Barad calls entangled. “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions.”[1] Nature is beautiful because it is entangled, precarious, difficult, imperfect, and even harsh. pieces of you are pieces of me as the title of the show therefore echoes Barad’s theory of entangled intra-relating, in which all forms of life, including human, emerge, “through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.”[2] Artist’s choice to risk her own vulnerability, to create work that depends on entanglement and chances possible breakdown, is precisely why this show speaks so powerfully about the need to let go of our species will to dominate."

[1] (Barad, ix).

[2] Ibid.