I created the series "Shelf Life" during the isolation of summer of 2020. Compost collection had been suspended in New York City, so I kept my food scraps in the freezer, hauling these frozen bundles to various community gardens and farmers market collections at the end of the week. The frozen scraps, beautiful in their diversity of colors and forms, took on a new kind of presence, an accounting of my movement through my weeks alone, a meditation on the conceptual boundaries between inside and outside. I was also, during this time, teaching an online drawing series and had set up mirrors for a class on self-portraits. Catching images of my own sweating, eating, transforming body in the mirror alongside the defrosting assemblages of compost I'd pulled out of the freezer to draw, the drawings merged. As I observed all the bodies leaking and becoming more fragrant, comingling in my senses and our shared atmosphere, drawing us all together became an acknowledgement of corporeal kinship and the transient nature of the identities we attach to our bodies of food and flesh.
