Jelly Kiki
Jelly Kiki is me, stripped down, scaled down, and made of jelly. An exact miniature reproduction of my naked body, she is a self-portrait with no skin, no bones, and very little structural integrity.
Translucent, wobbly and faintly grotesque, she occupies the space between a body and its imitation. I am interested in the strange intimacy of reproducing myself as an object: the vanity of making my own body into a sculpture, the absurdity of preserving it in a material that cannot quite preserve itself. She can be handled, submerged, displayed, and left to dissolve. She resembles me entirely, yet exists beyond my control.
Jelly Kiki first appeared in Sensory Disintegration Tank / Dissolution Chamber (2024), an installation exploring perception, political containment and the instability of mediated reality. Suspended in a tank of saltwater, her body gradually dissolved while distorted recordings of protest, political discourse and public rhetoric circulated through the surrounding space. The work brought together the vulnerability of a miniature body and the larger forces that shape how reality is experienced, understood and manipulated. As the figure floated, dissolved and slowly lost its form, the tank became a space in which staying afloat and being eaten away were not mutually exclusive conditions.
There is something perverse about making a copy of oneself that can be consumed. The body becomes image, object and substance at once; something to look at, to possess, perhaps even to devour. What does it mean to reproduce yourself, only to relinquish ownership of the result? Jelly Kiki holds the contradiction between the desire to preserve a self and the impossibility of keeping it intact. She is both an image of the body and a material body in her own right, subject to forces that the original cannot necessarily experience in the same way.
Since her first appearance, Jelly Kiki has resurfaced in different environments, acquiring new conditions without losing her resemblance to me. In Kiki's Baptism, she is immersed in a pool of jelly and held within a vessel formed from wax hands. The encounter shifts her from a body dissolving within a tank to a figure occupying a ceremonial setting, while retaining the same precarious relationship between form, material and environment.
Across these appearances, Jelly Kiki moves between the intimate and the grotesque, the sacred and the ridiculous. She is a double, a specimen, a devotional object and a body on display. Her changing surroundings alter what she becomes, while her material remains vulnerable to the conditions imposed upon it. She can be preserved as an image, but never entirely secured as a form.
Jelly Kiki is not an alter ego. She is me, but smaller, softer, and considerably easier to eat. ;)