Debt

Debt
Mixed Media Sculpture + Performance Series


Debt is a powerful sculptural and performance-based series that explores the psychological and generational weight of responsibility, expectation, and survival. Through handcrafted wooden wings adorned with block-printed feathers, artist Killian Williams-Morantine brings to life a symbolic burden that cannot be ignored—one made of both beauty and pressure.

This wearable sculpture is activated through performance photography. The artist, dressed in professional attire, enacts a narrative of effort, collapse, and quiet resilience. Whether climbing, falling, walking, or simply standing, his figure becomes a vessel for a collective story—one that asks: What do we carry? And what carries us?

These wings were never meant to fly. They were built to show the weight of trying.

Each feather is made from rice paper, hand-printed with layered imagery—snapshots of memory, currency, and cultural inheritance. The wings are wearable, but barely. They symbolize both potential and pressure, ambition and burden. In performance, I wear them as I walk, stumble, fall, and rise again—mirroring the lived tension between personal aspiration and systemic reality.

Debt is not just about money. It’s about identity. It’s about what we owe to those who came before us—and what it costs to keep going.

Each photo in this series documents a moment of narrative tension. The artist is seen checking the time, pushing forward, collapsing beneath the wings, or standing at the edge of a building. These images form a visual poem—fragmented, intimate, and starkly human.

Debt invites viewers into both the weight and the grace of endurance. The sculpture is beautiful, but heavy. The wings evoke freedom, yet pin the wearer down. Through this paradox, Killian challenges audiences to reflect on their own relationship to labor, expectation, and the cost of persistence.