/ɡrāp/(s) /əv/ /raTH/
Grapes of Wrath is a photo-sculpture series in which a copy of Steinbeck’s novel is shredded, mulched, and re-formed into a sculptural mass that holds the same dimensions as the original book. What was once a vessel for narrative is now a compressed object—dense, unreadable, yet undeniably present.
This act of transformation echoes a central thread in my practice: the tension between legibility and loss, between the physical persistence of information and its conceptual erasure. The work engages material as memory, questioning what remains when content is no longer accessible in its original form.
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath has been banned or censored in multiple U.S. school districts—a book about poverty, displacement, and systemic injustice silenced under the pretense of discomfort. By mulching the text, this piece doesn’t destroy the book; it reveals how fragile access to language and story can be when power fears what’s inside. The sculpture becomes a residue of resistance—a body made of the very words it’s been denied the right to speak.
Here, as in much of my work, process becomes an act of reckoning. Destruction is not the end, but a stage in the ongoing reconstitution of meaning. The book is no longer something to read. It’s something to confront.
This act of transformation echoes a central thread in my practice: the tension between legibility and loss, between the physical persistence of information and its conceptual erasure. The work engages material as memory, questioning what remains when content is no longer accessible in its original form.
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath has been banned or censored in multiple U.S. school districts—a book about poverty, displacement, and systemic injustice silenced under the pretense of discomfort. By mulching the text, this piece doesn’t destroy the book; it reveals how fragile access to language and story can be when power fears what’s inside. The sculpture becomes a residue of resistance—a body made of the very words it’s been denied the right to speak.
Here, as in much of my work, process becomes an act of reckoning. Destruction is not the end, but a stage in the ongoing reconstitution of meaning. The book is no longer something to read. It’s something to confront.