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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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