"Mnemonic Objects" are physical items used to trigger memories or aid in recalling information. I've been making versions of this porcupine skull in various scales and materials as a way of recalling a dream. This latest version is sculpted hollow so that the interiors contain impressions of fossils and flammable gas pipe fittings. In my dream, I remember a scene where thousands of beetles morphed into porcupines on top of a mesa while the sun was rising. At first I tried to read symbolism into this scene - beetles = death and transformation, porcupines - a guarded curiosity. Now I just enjoy making different versions of the skull and treating it like an excavation site, carving new iterations of the dream into the present with each sculpture. I replaced the natural teeth of the porcupine with enlarged replicas of my own back three molars so that this is a hybridization of me with the animal. Because I grind my teeth when I sleep, I was thinking that teeth are the fossil records of our dreams. For the exhibition Memory In Retrograde, I included two slightly different versions side by side because many of the works in this exhibition are about looping and repetitive behaviors common to people with memory loss. I see the sculptures sort of like fragmented phrases that are looping but mutating with each repetition. That's how my mother treated language in her final years battling Alzheimer's disease and I was always surprised at how unpredictable and creative it was.