Nancy Fleischman

My body aches, my joints feel like they are tearing apart and filled with fluid at the same time, my muscles feel like they are shredding, and my skin feels like it is on fire while also being so tender and thin it might tear just from looking at it. Breathing alone hurts. I am in pain and it is killing me. This all happens internally, no one sees.

Materials are real, alive like skin they breathe, record, change, grow, translating and becoming an extension of myself. They act as a timeline that mimics human life and existence. I explore the fragility of materiality. Fragility that edges its way morbidly into non-existence, once tangible becoming intangible. Humbling. Objects for the body, from the body, and of the body.

Estranged objects become surrogates for the reality of my experience. These surrogates are versions of sensory prostheses, simplified and extreme versions of a subtle experience. The work is in the little moments when few people are paying attention.

I started casting pins because I had a nostalgic memory with my grandmother being a seamstress and having me and my brother as children pick up all the pins she would drop on her floor for her when we would come over. Pins were also so small that I had never tried to cast something so thin and small; it felt like a challenge. I tried with a mold for some time which didn’t work, then went onto paper pressed molds which left me flat pins, and then moved onto paper pulp molds which I think will have success. Meanwhile, I have a rhino mold and cast that in plaster and tried to cast that and it worked just fine. So, I have been using that. These pins are about 2.5” long. I am working on going smaller with success. I am still working on the installation of these.