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Every piece of art carries more of its maker than the maker intends. I have committed to bodies of work that set out to speak about the world, only to discover, years later, that they were speaking about me. This is the quiet miracle of art, and a large part of why I have kept my work in my possession for the past decade. There came a point when I felt I needed to stop sharing it, to shield it from scrutiny and appropriation, and to allow it to continue its conversation with me in private. What remained were the unsold pieces I returned to again and again, and something in the passage of time gave those works a voice they had not seemed to possess when I made them. Whether that voice could have reached someone else who had lived with them, I cannot say. The message felt private, intimate, arriving from a version of myself I had drifted from, one I had been most fully unified with in the unconscious act of making. So when did the separation occur? The moment I was permitted to see clearly, though only time could make the image whole. It is alchemy, always alchemy.

What brought this new piece into being is still disclosing itself to me. As I move through this period of my life, I find myself arriving at interior territories I had previously only glimpsed from afar. I think of the girl in her school uniform wandering an empty Catholic church, inhabiting the worlds held inside richly colored stained glass, drawing one fingertip slowly along the lacquered surface of a pew, tracing the tiny grouted lines between myth-making mosaic stones, breathing in the ghost of sacred smoke. I think of the same girl, barefoot and dirt-covered, humming to herself in a dress, walking over sun-warmed concrete to press her face against a chain-link fence and watch black ants circle the tight buds of peonies in a neighbor’s yard. These memories do not multiply. They only deepen. A little girl in sacred space, moved by art and nature, witnessing the world and being held within it, mattering to nothing beyond the moment itself. Stories folded inside stories, meaningful only to the one who carries them.

I did not plan any of it, and perhaps I am only now assigning significance to an object. But what I see before me is the Immaculate Heart. The sacred feminine archetype in full: her solitary path, her burden, her gifts. She is a figure of unresolved tension, absorbing the weight of humanity not because it is asked of her but because her nature permits no other response. She is the most misunderstood of martyrs, and the conflict she holds within herself mirrors, in some form, every person and every place that has ever been made to feel separate from the whole.

I have witnessed harm and carried it as though it were my own reflection. Salvation was never a concept that reached me, nor did I find comfort in the idea that failing is its own punishment. Absolutes escape me, though the mind keeps reaching for them. My conviction wavers and my will is worn at the edges. What remains is devotion to the process itself, which is the only path I have found that holds. When I lose my footing, I return to solitude the way one returns to the breath, without judgment, beginning again. What I share with the Immaculate Heart is sorrow: a love incapable of betraying its own nature, the weight of crosses carried for those unwilling to set down their own, and a frequency that cannot be explained, only felt. It is the condition of self-separation, mistakenly envisaged as something set against you.

Many from One: stoking the fire with our own errors, defending the very life we keep wounding, held back by nothing but ourselves. She is present in every bond between women, and there is no one through whom they come to know themselves more honestly than her.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Immaculate Heart : antique mother of pearl, bone, communion wafers, porcupine quill, brass, Japanese paper, flocking, string cut from cello bow after playing self-written song, refurbished antique frame. Detail pictures to share soon.

14 x 16 x 2 : Holy Ghost : a solo exhibit at Chaos Contemporary Craft / Columbus, Ohio : Fall 2027

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I’ve just returned home from a long journey out of the west with my entire Trinity series in tow. Each art-week period feels like a major milestone, and they very much are. Nothing has turned out as expected, and the one essential lesson I’ve learned from that is that I must maintain balance to be most adaptable to the unclear path ahead. All my energy is wrapped up in pending creation, as a default mode of living out this very lesson. My efforts lie in preparation, and I now stand firm on the precipice.

Some things I’ve changed over the past few months have fed that energy. I’m in the cleansing stage of course, sobering up in every way, in every direction, and clearing out the excess while tidying up what remains. Cleansing is a ritual, a ceremonial bath. It amplifies the spirit, gives volume to inner voice. Shedding layers, releasing weight, assisting the winds of change. Expect to find new writing entries happening here throughout the process, as I’ve greatly limited social interactions in lieu of creative work.
I am stepping back from the hum of everyday conversation to listen more closely to the quieter sounds that shape a project: the hush of early mornings, the static between ideas, the friction of revision. This space will record what I discover, what I discard, and what endures. Entries will vary; fragments, reflections, draft passages, and occasional structural notes, all intended to map the evolving form of the work.

Attention is a rare material. To produce something considered, each thread of focus must be protected from the small, insistent demands that normally dictate time. Reducing social commitments is investment; a deliberate allocation of attention toward making and refining.

Expect frequent, irregular updates that capture progress and process, honest takes on breakthroughs and dead ends, short excerpts of writing that may later change or be folded into larger pieces, occasional practical remarks about schedule and milestones when helpful.

Please remember, these writings are a work in progress, not finished offerings. Consider them invitations to witness formation rather than final statements, a catalogue of decisions; recurring themes and revisions will reveal priorities. As an archive of attention; where it lands, how it moves, and what it leaves.

You’ll see process outpace polish, constraint used as a means of clarity, and how solitude, when chosen for creation rather than escape, shapes the work’s surface and its deeper architecture.

Today, three weeks after my return from out west, I am completing my first piece of art for next year’s solo exhibit. I’ve refrained from writing anything about it until I worked it out, as it’s been a difficult one to come by and I’ve really been sitting with this theme; womanhood, devotion, and love. Over the past three months, I’ve experienced a lot change. I call it my bottleneck moment, because though it was a challenging period, I now feel release, renewal, and focus. My path is more clear than ever before. It has been some time since I’ve felt inner peace like this, and I have all that chaos to thank for pulling me back into remembrance.

I will share a bit about the new piece soon.

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I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror, but because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.