UNT Murchison Performing ARts Center

Where does the body end, and where does care begin? Where the Spirit Settles presents a deeply speculative and materially rich body of work by Narong Tintamusik, now on view at the UNT Murchison Performing Arts Center.

"Where the Spirit Settles contemplates the sanctity of the body and the inaccessibility of healthcare through fictive wooden medical diagnostic paintings. These works envision a future in which craft becomes an essential survival technology, enabling the assessment of human health in collapsed ecological and infrastructural systems.

The artist’s ongoing series, Underneath the Skin of My Mother’s Clothing, draws on themes from environmental science, traditional Thai medicine, and fortune-telling. In this fictive desolate world, wood can function as a medical diagnostic tool due to the tree’s phytoremediation abilities, a process in which roots absorb contaminants from soil and water. Future Thai health-spiritualists would apply a patient’s essence to the wood, dyeing it with aniline and etching it to generate various kinds of images, such as culturally informed views of the body’s internal structures and subtle, atmospheric fields of the psyche.

Tintamusik’s earlier works in this series included laser-etched reinterpretations of the artist’s mother’s Thai ikat textiles, which were photographed and digitally manipulated to appear as cellular and molecular information. Later pieces in the series leaned more toward celestial terrains, focusing on cycles of dyeing, bleaching, sanding, and re-dyeing wood like cloth.

Where the Spirit Settles reflects on how craft traditions and care persist amid collapse, seeing how our bodies and their internal worlds can continue to hold when systems fail."

Through a synthesis of craft, speculative futures, and embodied knowledge, Tintamusik invites us to reconsider the relationships between ecology, care, and cultural memory.