When I arrived at the Wormfarm Artist-in-Residence during the summer of 2024, I was estranged from my own creative practice. I left my usual tools behind, not to purify my process, but to see what remained when I stopped trying to make work that felt legitimate to me. There were no electronics, no code. Only paper, a variety of paint, and a quiet disinterest in performing artistry. I didn’t use brushes. I smeared and transferred pigment like an animal in protest of high art. This approach was not a statement, but a casual recognition of anti-authority and methodlessness. I created prints that were never meant to become images. It was a kind of primal acknowledgment of the absurdity that human creativity, something essential to our species, has been formalized into a gated tradition. What anyone can do has been turned into something only a few are allowed to access. Through this unstructured approach, cloud forms began to appear. They were impermanent, barely images at all. After the residency, I returned to my studio, scanned the prints, and animated them. I let them drift and morph inside digital feedback loops and analog signal chains. What began as an unceremonious gesture, meaning without message, evolved into a familiar and shapely language of moving image. The critique became signal. The installation continues this loop. A plain wooden column, rough and unadorned, contains a screen and mirrors that reflection of the video. It mimics the form of a pedestal but offers no object to admire. Instead, it invites the viewer to look downward into the work. This is a gesture toward the absurd machinery of artistic elevation, the frame, the platform, the act of reverence itself. This piece is recursive in both form and meaning. It reflects on the strange loop in which creativity becomes culture, culture becomes status, and expression becomes property. It re-enters the cycle from the bottom rather than the top. The clouds are not symbols. They fail to keep shape, just like art, just like meaning, just like this statement, which tries to say what cannot be said without reinforcing the very system it questions.

Below are some pictures of Skudding at the Woolen Mill Gallery in Reedsburg Wisconsin; Skudding was exhibited at Produced and Attracted. The video above this text was the video used for the sculpture.