My art practice is to foster interdependence, to nurture what Donna Haraway calls “response-ability”: becoming able to respond to the other, particularly those who die before their time because of capitalism and ecological destruction. My art practice is to make compost — ephemeral site-specific installations that weave together discarded materials — and to perform mourning rituals for dead kin. I call these works “the grief web”.

I started making the “grief web” during a season of great loss in my community. In one spring week of 2022, four people I knew from my childhood in San Francisco’s Excelsior District were killed in gang-related shootings. Later, a high school classmate was killed in a car robbery. Another died in a motorcycle crash. Another was killed by the Vallejo Police. My grandmother died unexpectedly in November. And in February of 2025, I lost my grandfather, my last living grandparent. 

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I was far from home, pursuing a college degree that distanced me physically and socioeconomically from my childhood community. In losing others, I lost myself. I felt that, estranged as I was, I had no right to feel grief so painfully. Art was my only way to respond, but how could I presume to make art about the dead when they were gone, and I went on living?

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I found my grief articulated in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. Butler writes, we are “from the start, given over to the other... vulnerable to a range of touch that includes the eradication of our being at one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other”. These ties “compose us”. When we lose each other, we become lost to ourselves. We attempt to “repudia[te] vulnerability itself” by becoming violent, exploiting others’ vulnerability as ours has been exploited. Or, we attempt to harm ourselves “as a vain effort to preempt… the next blow”.  

As Butler gave me the language to articulate grief, the rapper Ksmigz taught me to grieve through art. KSmigz, or Kieran Carlson, was my friend in elementary school. He was killed in the 2022 shootings. He left behind “Long Live 52”, a song dedicated to his friend Goose 52 who was killed in 2021. The lyrics express Ksmigz’ violent desire for retribution and the suicidal desire to relieve his pain. His anguish is cross-cut by his love. Goose was an inextricable part of Ksmigz’ identity —  his brother, his kin. Losing Goose, Ksmigz loses himself: “you made me question everything cuz you ain’t live life.”

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“Long Live 52” became the foundation for my first grief work: “Excelsior, Still Higher”, a memorial t-shirt inspired by my neighborhood’s vigil traditions. On the shirt, I wore the names and faces of the young men we lost, entwined with Ksmigz’ lyrics and my poetry. On my left arm, I wrote: “KILL. Since you gone, he goes. Relieve me.” On my right: “DIE. Since you gone, I go. Release me.”

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These personal losses wove me into a web of systemic loss. In my neighborhood, premature death is not a random tragedy but a regular outcome of economic exploitation and ecological destruction. Grief taught me to see how vulnerability is unequally distributed, as capitalist-colonizers enforce, as Butler writes, the prerogative to transgress “the boundaries of [others], but never [have their] own boundaries transgressed”. 

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I became obsessed with the boundaries of public grief: who is mourned and who is not. I archived posts from popular Bay Area accounts that appropriated the deaths of my friends into sensational crime stories. I read lists of people killed by San Francisco’s Police, many of whom were homeless and whose bodies were “not claimed by relatives”. I started noticing — really noticing — the roadkilled animals along the freeway. Roadkilled animals became the central image of capitalist ecocide in my practice: creatures killed by car-dependent capitalism who are not mourned by the culture that kills them. As a human driver, I felt complicit in their deaths and obligated to mourn them.

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When my grandmother died, I was studying abroad at the University of Kent, where I first encountered extinction studies scholars like Donna Haraway, Deborah Bird Rose, and Thom van Dooren, and indigenous artists like Cecilia Vicuña and Duane Linklater. These elders led me out of my violent spiral through their work on multispecies mourning and interdependent ecologies. Two species model the central practices I now follow as an artist: magpie funerals and vulture composting.

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As described by Thom van Dooren, magpies perform funerals for their dead kin. In one such ritual, magpies gently touch the body of a roadkilled sibling with their beaks and bring offerings of grass. Then, they arch their necks toward the sky and howl. Van Dooren writes that magpies mourn because they belong to a meaningfully shared world, in which the loss of another profoundly problematizes the borders of self, world, and other. Magpies taught me to join their chorus of howls, to situate my grief within a web of loss that connects many interdependent species. 

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Following magpies, I began to perform funerals for roadkilled animals. I made a second memorial t-shirt, writing the names of the dead on the inside, against my skin: extinct local species, people killed by SFPD, kin and kin of kin. In “grief web [performance]”, I tore the shirt open in the woods, weaving it into my hair, mud, and branches. The branches scratched through my skin and I, despite my care, broke branches. We became unbounded, open, porous. 

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My second practice is vulture compost. We are taught to view vultures as scavengers, but vultures are essential composters in their ecologies. Their stomach acid is strong, and by eating roadkilled animals and other carcasses, they cleanse bodies of toxins and prevent the pollution of local waterways. Vultures, along with mushrooms and other scavengers, decompose waste created by climate destruction into the soil of life. 

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Following vultures, I search for roadkilled remains: materials that have been abandoned on roadways, crushed by cars, mud, and rain. I look for branches, petals and other natural materials, and for clothing and bedclothes that were once close to bodies. These I transform into ephemeral altarpieces for dead kin, carefully weaving parts into a precarious whole which I house in local trees and galleries. The sculptures are fragile and ephemeral, easily broken: a strand of a frayed bedsheet bends a branch gently, moss quivers from thread, dry mud cakes hair.

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Statement updated April 2026.