The proposition of the practice is anti-propositional. It is constant experimentation toward that which is intrinsically unknowable. It is a practice of questions, openness, and presence. It emerges from a life lived in pursuit of the same values.
Continuity and transformation are themes. My work teems with creatures giving birth to themselves over and over again, parthenogenetic species, and continuous lines. Cycles repeat, waver, fail, and sputter onward.
Most recently, my work has engaged books as a subject, an interest generated by a lifetime of reading. I use calligraphy, text, and abstraction to create works that confound and extend the experience of reading. For example, I follow the paths of bookworms, tracing their eating journeys through old manuscripts. I consider the worms’ paths as textual consumption—and as language. What if wormholes are also a symbolic system? This research has led to holes drilled in walls; a zine of found poetry; and rubbed drawings.
I process my research and ideas through a rich material practice that engages uncontrollable physical forces. I make my own grounds and paints, including creating magnetic paint out of iron, steel, and magnetite shavings, which I then manipulate with magnets. I marble paper, letting water take control. I forge steel calligraphy and create tools out of cardboard and aluminum to generate big, sweeping marks.
In my series “Lizards Lizards,” I marble around a folded sheet of paper, creating a two-sided marbling that appears like scales, a wave, or a cosmic disturbance. The calligraphy on these pieces features a story about whiptail lizards, an actual lizard species that has eggs but no sperm and clones itself to reproduce. The writing includes long tails and extra legs: the text, which moves in and out of legibility, becomes the lizard. These pieces grew out of my interest in fertility and the imaginative possibilities other species present to us around reproduction.
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