Lakeshore sands perform as active agents, carrying the imprints of the lake’s long history. Each grain is a fragment of geological time, shaped over millennia by cycles of erosion, deposition, and movement.

Cadophora, often seen as detritus or waste, takes on new meaning as a focal point for exploring the lake’s ecological cycles. Rather than being discarded, these materials are transformed into symbols of interconnection.

The performance challenges anthropocentric aesthetics that prioritize cleanliness and order, embracing instead the messy, excessive realities of natural processes. Through this, the work calls attention to the ways in which we are bound to the material world, our bodies always in dialogue with the larger cycles of life and decay.

Through the audience’s sensory engagement—visually via projections and aurally through the amplified sounds of peeling and scraping—the work evokes an embodied awareness of temporality. It invites viewers to experience these sticky materials not merely as static objects, but as reminders of the constant flux of time and change. Inspired by the philosophy of base materialism, which rejects dualisms such as pure/impure or high/low, Skinned the Lake embraces the raw, chaotic forces that underlie life. The act of peeling cadophora and sand from the skin confronts us with this base materiality, where the wet, coarse, and organic elements of the lakeshore become symbolic of the body’s own materiality—its entanglement with decay, renewal, and transformation. This intimate and unsettling tactile process highlights the porousness of the body’s boundaries, framing it not as a closed system but as a site of exchange with the environment.