As a child in the 1990s, my father was on foreign assignment and our family lived with him over the course of two summers. When he left for work, he’d leave Italian lira on the kitchen table and my mother would decide what we would do that day based on how much he left. We usually took the buses into the city center and wandered around ruins or Baroque churches, or wind our way through museums. My mother brought big jars of peanut butter in our suitcases so, most days, we’d sit in front of a fountain at lunchtime. She’d pull peanut butter sandwiches out of a JanSport backpack, we’d eat, and then we would refill large plastic water bottles in the fountain and continue on our way. My mother had a map and a green guidebook and, when we arrived at a destination, she’d read from it as we scuttled around. We would often make up stories about the things we saw because we didn’t have enough historical context between the guidebook and mounted plaques to understand what we were looking at, but that was the most fun part.

We saw marble figures everywhere, often carved with drapery covering their bodies. When I was back in Rome during college, I studied these same marble figures: more lifelike covered in their drapery than a real person under the covers, I thought. I imagined that I could become like them through a short durational performance: waiting for a wet cover to dry over me, cold like the marble and unable to hear past the threshold. I held onto this idea for years for a number of reasons—none of them interesting, mostly not having the materials figured out. Plus, I didn’t think there was anything particularly interesting about my body underneath a cover.

Then, I got pregnant and this long-incubating idea began to take form. My assistant and I spent months testing materials. When I was about 38 weeks, full-term, we cast my body with a single sheet of paper impregnated with methyl cellulose, an organic material used in bookbinding and conservation. It was important that, materially, Full-term was executed with one ‘move’ in reference to the single material of sculptures like Saint Cecelia and Veiled Christ. What covers them is weightless but specific, describing their shape in order to tell their story.