Lately I've been working around how language is grafted onto bodies and landscapes and the ways they react to its inscription. In those moments when definitions and syntax fail at description or refuse to walk an idea forward in a straight line, contradiction and confusion become a means of navigation. Error and indeterminacy open up fissures in a narrative. They make space for those unruly and persistent voices reminding us that the past is still present and that no story lives alone.

I draw my material vocabulary from Rustbelt Catholicism, Shakerism, and country music. The common denominator I see is a collision of grace and labor. This colloquial language-made-tangible has a grammar to be teased apart. I look for the spaces between the object and the name, between meaning and use. Empathy without self-interest starts in a similar place outside of linear comprehension. Maybe it's learning to listen for new languages without expecting to understand, or as Simone Weil wrote, …not to try to interpret them, but to look at them until the light suddenly dawns.