‘The More Things Are Clawed...’ examines the body as both material form and metaphor, a contested site where social constructs are inscribed, fractured, and remade. 

The work cross examines the body as a place of resistance and reconfiguration, where rupture and repair mirror the unraveling and reweaving of collective ideologies and imagined orders. The title itself references the dual nature of clawing: both destructive and transformative. It evokes an image of tearing through stagnant norms, of actively resisting structures that fail to promote cooperation, mutual care, or unity. To claw is to grasp, to fight, to mark, to reshape; a gesture of refusal as much as one of survival. In this piece, clawing becomes a metaphor for challenging the systems that demand coherence at the expense of complexity, and sameness at the expense of difference. Two severed elements are rejoined through a woven, bone-like structure, an intervention that is at once anatomical and symbolic. This fragile insertion acts like connective tissue: an ‘emergency repair’ or a prosthetic extension that binds broken parts not in perfect restoration, but in an evolved, hybrid state. The transparency and fragility of the basket-like weave collapse distinctions between surface and structure, body and object, repair and augmentation. This act of mending is not neutral; it is political. The forms enter into dialogue, proposing that transformation is never singular or static but collaborative and ongoing. Change here is not about restoration or return, but about the continual unfolding of new forms emerging through tension, negotiation, and care. The woven insert becomes a physical model of collective discourse, where disparate parts are held together not by uniformity, but by their commitment to coexistence.

Aggression and care coexist in this configuration. The splayed reed ends claw outward like wounds, like talons, embodying both pain and resistance. The piece draws subtle but urgent parallels to individual experiences of trauma, including domestic violence and mental health crises. These private ruptures are inseparable from wider social fractures, pointing to the ways in which personal and collective healing are always entangled. As a seat, a place of rest, positioning, and conforming, the object embodies the tension between subordination and challenge the object foregrounds the politics of support. To sit is to accept a posture, to enter a structure. But this altered stool unsettles that dynamic. It holds while questioning what is held up and at what cost. It becomes both a site of support and of disruption: a symbolic corner for those navigating instability, a space that offers literal and metaphorical structure amid fragmentation.

The More Things Are Clawed proposes that real healing and real change requires more than restoration. It asks us to consider how we might claw not only at oppressive systems, but how we claw toward each other. Through the tactile language of weaving and binding, it gestures toward modes of collective support that embrace fragility and difference rather than erase them. The piece imagines identity as porous, hybrid, and in motion, formed not through closure, but through radical empathy and continuous becoming. It proposes that collective healing requires embracing complexity and holding difference in dynamic tension rather than demanding coherence or closure. Rather than presenting transformation as a destination, this work invites us to see it as a process: of clawing, challenging, and reweaving the fraying threads of our social fabric into new, speculative configurations of care, resistance, and possibility.