Twyla Exner

Cling is a series of satellite dishes altered through the addition of cast urethane barnacles. The work draws on the visual and conceptual similarity between satellite dishes mounted on buildings and barnacles growing across rock surfaces, both forms of attachment that accumulate over time and quietly reshape the structures they inhabit.

Satellite dishes function as sites of transmission, connecting orbiting infrastructure with personal devices and the invisible space of digital exchange. Barnacles, by contrast, are organisms that colonize and persist on any available surface. In Cling, these two systems overlap: both are receptive structures that extend outward, receiving signals or sustenance, and both often remain fixed in place long after their original purpose has faded.

Installed in clustered groupings across interior and exterior environments, the barnacle-encrusted dishes form congregations of receivers that are subtly detached from their utilitarian role, shifting from functional infrastructure to speculative, organism-like presences.