Erin Neve

This work began in 2012 when I accepted a job at a religious school, and I found myself observing others acting out sincere devotion grounded in specific bodily rituals.  I watched as they bowed, chanted, sung, ate wafers, and prayed.  They believed thaat bodies that ritually perform these sacred acts express the divine. Guided by a complex history of liturgical tradition, like a dance, I watched as these devout practitioners performed for God to make visible that which is invisible. In Bread Towers, I build towers of bread as stand-ins for the physical body.  The structures are made of individual bread pieces balanced entirely on each other.   In my studio, the act of balancing quickly became a meditative ritual that requires focus, patience, and a delicate hand.  Most towers fall within seconds; some last minutes so that I am able to photograph the structure before it collapses.  I learn each piece of bread, how it is shaped, how it shifts, moves, where the weight falls, its density, its limitations; each piece becomes a part of the whole bread-body.  The resulting photographs are minimalist still lives of upward grounded fragile pillars of bodily material. www.erinneve.com