DeWorm, 2025
Durational performance

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August 6-9, 2025 
Art Gallery of Regina
 

DeWorm is a durational performance in which I dismantled Worm (2020–22), a 1000-foot soft sculpture created during my MFA from the contents of my closet.
 

In 2020, I cut apart every garment I owned and stitched the fragments together into long, colour-coded strips of fabric. These strips were joined into a continuous tubular form and stuffed with poly-fil. The resulting sculpture became an absurd and unwieldy object: part transitional object, part trauma archive, part parasite, part companion. Clothing that had once held and protected my body was transformed into another kind of body; one that accumulated, contained, and occupied space.
 

Several years later, DeWorm returned to this object through an act of unmaking. Over three days, I worked publicly at the Art Gallery of Regina, opening Worm seam by seam and pulling the stuffing from its interior. The repetitive labour of its construction was reversed: sewing became seam-ripping, stuffing became emptying, accumulation became dispersal.

The performance considers unmaking as a form of labour in its own right. Drawing from feminist histories of textile and domestic work, DeWorm attends to the cyclical gestures of making and remaking: stitching and unstitching, binding and releasing, holding together and allowing things to come apart. Rather than treating destruction as the opposite of creation, the performance asks what new possibilities might emerge through undoing.
 

This reversal also complicates the idea of healing as a linear process. Worm materialized trauma through accumulation. Years of clothing, memory, labour, and material was compressed into a single excessive form. DeWorm does not attempt to erase that history or arrive at resolution. Instead, trauma is approached as something that can be returned to, handled, rearranged, and transformed over time. 
 

At the conclusion of the performance, the poly-fil stuffing removed from Worm was offered to artists and makers from the Regina community to use in their own projects. What had been contained within one sculpture was dispersed into the possibility of many others. The material therefore does not disappear; it continues beyond my authorship and beyond the body of the original work.

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DeWorm is both an undoing and a becoming.