Crawl

2026

8’ x 2.5’ x 9’

steel rods, LED lights, cotton, wire, glue, hay, dirt, hair

Crawl is a sculptural cocoon expanded to host moments of growth, connection, and change. When we attempt to fit our lives into orderly structures, we often fail. This work offers a non-linear and un-restricted structure to represent the expansive, intertwined nature of life. Depicting many lives and states braided together, this piece is an abstracted and reimagined metal timeline of the collective entanglement of lived experiences.

From afar, Crawl looms as a life unfolding, disturbing and nearly indigestible; up close, moments of combining and pushing apart are experienced intimately. Welded steel rods, typically used to strengthen and enforce construction, become nodes that track memories and connections along the timeline. Softened by heat, grinded into organic shapes, and rusted by hand, the metal continues to provide structure while breathing with life through formed curves, knots, and bends. Intersections hold lights cocooned with natural cotton and dusted with hay and dirt. These moments of light depict an organic life force while illuminating and enlarging specific emotions, relationships, and emerging growths. Thus, Crawl is an archive and timeline, holding histories and tracking non-linear growth. With new forms warming, metamorphosing, and emerging within, Crawl participates in the lived experience of crawling through time.

*This project was Sommers’ capstone thesis project as a Studio Art major at Kenyon College. They were awarded the Peterson Prize