Artist Statement

 

I think of the body first, this first language: to live, to move, to eat, to touch—We carry this knowledge of longing, of limitation. 

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Unaffected in our first breaths as infants, we hold within the borders of our skin the infinite expanse of what we might become. The world begins its slow work on us, pruning and carving, shaping what was once boundless.

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I sit, daily with a thousand questions. They spill across the table like salt, too fine to gather back into the jar. Why this form, this skin, wet interior of blood and fragile bone held together so lightly? Why this turning toward the light?

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I look to the edges—where the known buckles, and what remains unnamed waits, in the dust, offstage, in the dark. I dream of placing the humming spaces between names in the noon sun, of swinging a door open, and everything I’ve ever wanted to know tumbles out, clear and bright as eyes.

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The past takes me by the wrist. I follow myth and alchemy down the crooked roads of those who reached, blind, toward meaning, who poured gold into leaden questions, traced the shape of the stars onto stone. I search their trades and translations, the movement of ideas, of objects passed from palm to palm, a coin, a shell worn smooth by its journey through a thousand exchanges.

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And I think of the networks—of ships and caravans, but then, threads of light, signals slipping at the speed of a click across the earth. Ones and zeros, open, closed — bearing dreams and desires, ideologies, vast and varied creeds. They were all ephemeral, dirtied in the rub back and forth of internalized colonialism, complex identities sold as clip art, 8 bits, memes, a building of static in a system by then too loud to hear itself.

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I return then to my body, as a map of asking. Its hunger, its movement, its reach for what cannot be held—what does it say about who we are? About what we dream, and why? What does the child in me remember that the adult has forgotten?

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My work begins where curiosity resides, in the hands, in the dirt, the shifting matrix of silica and water, bound up with cobalt, lead, gold (and all who brought these up from mines). In the soft insistence of a question pressing, out from the center, in against the dark. I follow the gravity of a material, a process, a form, an idea—string theory, Roman arches, a lover’s words, the flash of a memory of the newness of something now long faded. Each gesture invites something both absurd and tender in its asking, a reach for an answer that dissolves at the touch.

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Once, I thought I could untangle it—the scaffolding of chance arranged like this. But now, I only listen, to the spaces where the known collapses into wonder, to the liminal, where the shift is still happening.

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"I think of Mary Oliver’s poem about her dog, Percy, who could be ‘silly and noble in the same moment.’ That’s what the vulnerability of questioning, of openness, feels like—a daring, clumsy leap into the boundless and unknowable, with a tail wagging behind, as if uncertainty itself could somehow be the thing that saves us."

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