Interstitial Spaces is a sculptural installation that uses disability as a generative framework for reimagining bodily and architectural structures. Rooted in the experience of receiving a connective tissue disorder diagnosis, the project questions what it means to inhabit a body understood medically as improperly formed. Rather than treating this difference as deficit, the installation draws on crip theory to foreground instability, variation, and nonlinear structure as a site of knowledge and possibility.

The installation features intentionally malformed cinderblock forms. Their undulating, asymmetrical surfaces and single-direction stackability position them as “crip objects”, forms that resist normative standards of utility and coherence. They refuse to behave like traditional building blocks and instead propose alternate ways of understanding structural integrity: as adaptive, contingent, and deeply tied to lived experience. These objects sit in a liminal space between functional and dysfunctional, mirroring the ambiguities of disabled embodiment.

Two central gestures within the installation intensify this exploration. First, a cast cinderblock extends directly through the gallery wall, creating a literal portal. This breach creates a perceptual ruptures that often accompany chronic pain and disabled experience. This portal invites viewers to turn attention inward and shift spatial orientation momentarily.

An elongated cinderblock form, with its wooden casting cavities left intact, traverses the installation like a connective channel. These stretched wooden voids echo the internal conduits of the body: tissues, vessels, and pathways that are often sites of instability in connective tissue disorders. Embedded within the elongated block are organelle-like porcelain forms, which act as materialized proxies for chronic pain. Because pain is pervasive yet invisible, creating visible “pain artifacts” allows the work to treat sensation as something that leaves traces—something recordable, interpretable, and structurally formative.

Throughout Interstitial Spaces, the residual wood forms allude to the mold-making process. Each installation component marks a moment of construction to question utility and time. The wooden boxes signify blocks yet to be formed. The final undulating concrete forms act as a facsimile of ‘a becoming’.