Tina Lam creates sculptures, installations and performances based on landart interventions, which reflect on notions of interconnection, otherness and metamorphosis. Her work examines the physical, metaphorical and mystical entanglements within the continuum of the human, the beyond-human and the unknown.

She ventures into forests to collect traces of the planet's body by molding black aluminum foil onto boulders, branches and root systems that she then melds with materials ranging from paper to steel. Her land-art interventions can be likened to a therapeutic fieldwork that seeks to reconcile with the traumatic relationship her Cambodian-Chinese refugee parents have with the great outdoors.

Drawing inspiration from her scientific training, Eastern philosophy and New Materialism, her recent installations are characterized by the hybridization of the material, the haptic and the mystical. In her work, abstract and natural forms coexist with scars and emotions, amplifying physicist Karen Barad's thesis that “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.” Through this slow tactile process, she puts herself in communion with the elemental and mysterious forces that sculpt the planet and our humanity.

Lam was born in Montreal and holds a MFA from Cornell University, a BFA from Concordia University, and a PhD in chemistry from McGill University. She has participated in many residencies, among which Shandaken: Storm King and NARS Foundation, and exhibited her work at Ortega Y Gasset, Jack Hanley Gallery, Le Livart and Centre articule.

Tina Lam has been selected by L'Écart as part of the PRÉSENCES project. She is taking part in the group exhibition Amplifier l'errance, guetter le sillon des foulées, presented at L'Écart until June 1.