Kory Twaddle MFA 2006
I explore my own lived experiences and my body's interactions with space as subject matter for my bigrammatic work, in which I seek to give physical presence to my own ethereal experiences via lived diagrams. My biograms are records of the lived moment, of specific periods of time and particular spaces, of my own life. They present the body and its innards in an abstracted and somewhat playful way in efforts to examine how the body and the spaces it inhabits are intertwined both in reality and as conceptual architectures in the imagination. Blood veins, for instance, appear in my work as moving pathways in the body between oft-visited locations, or particularly important rooms in a building. In one series of work, the movement occurs as “book cells” duplicate in mitosis. The alignment of cells during reproduction calls for them to arrange themselves in straight rows, much like books upon a shelf. Reading books (or acquiring knowledge of any kind) literally changes me (and others) both intellectually and physically because the connections between brain cells actually multiply as we learn.

In the process of investigating my own interactions with space, I seek to better understand how humans use proprioception (the body's sense of its own parts, their locations relative to each other and to surroundings, and memorization of repeated familiar actions) and synesthesia (the psychological phenomenon of experiencing strong associations between seemingly unrelated things, such as a number and a color) as new windows into how people experience environments. My work is imaginary in that it is based on perception, cognition, and hallucination, without allowing cognition to be first among equals. My biograms are maps of my experiences with both physical and psychological spaces.