Jell-O—soups, sits, and sets—undergoing transmutation from fat and solid to powder to liquid to a semi-solid once again. As a sculptural material it is intrinsically linked to the idea of “leftover,” a cast born from the mold, the shadow shape from a stencil, the daughter and the mother. Both a leftover in its physicality and materiality, Jell-O also could be deemed a leftover through its literal and metaphorical traces encapsulated—containing extracted and skimmed fat and collagen from boiled bones from other mammals.

Traces of unknown others’ are contained in the Jell-O. With gelatin derived from collagen taken from animal parts, it is then a living surface of others’ deaths. The material quality of the Jell-O sheets slowly morph from malleable, translucent plastic-like films, to a more and more opaque, crisp surface that grows brittle, darkens, and breaks away. It is living but not alive through stilled undulations of frozen drapery, but also in a perpetual state of dying in that there is no “end.” There is no “final form” the skins take. As they darken, harden, and break apart, fragments are kept to re-melt and re-pour.

Impressions of reused containers—tins, bottles, molds and more—are held in each new shell, as well as the ghosts of these unknown others.