MOTHER BENT is an audio and video installation that includes human and nonhuman elements, a collection of beings that are living alongside each other. The work questions the myth of human supremacy through an entanglement of uncanny visual forms and a sonic calling for interspecies communication. Replications and mutations of disembodied human flesh invite a blossoming of biodiversity. 

Growing out of Alicia’s research into the relationships between neurodivergent experience and Shamanic practice, MOTHER BENT uses a neurodivergent lens to create moments of quiet and cacophony, focus and wholeness, offering different ways of seeing and sensing. It also draws on the ancient Shamanic practice of journeying, in which the subject is transported to other worlds in an altered form of consciousness. This visionary state can involve working with nonhuman allies – animals, plants and spirits – to receive their teachings and medicine. Alicia uses the practice of journeying to remember ancient knowledges in an attempt to find alternate ways of being in a neurotypical society.

MOTHER BENT is installed in the Library Lecture Hall, with additional works in the adjacent main Library building.