My practice as a poet has always been deeply involved with place and the idea of permanence. I'm increasingly interested in combining mediums to create places, or spaces, even virtual ones, that a person can enter. I want a definite tether between maker and work and viewer. Digital technologies have made it possible for me to explore all manner of means of doing this—sound, visuals, film, photographs, collage. My goal, however, is to transcend the coldness of the digital. The screen itself feels cold, is a cold light, and my challenge is to make work that very vividly acknowledges the presence of a human hand. 

The dichotomy between work that "exists" online (thereby existing only as a kind of ephemera) and actual physical objects that, while they have mass, are then vulnerable to disintegration, is fascinating to me. Only that which exists can cease to exist. As my perspective evolves with age, I find that tension—between process and product—to be more pronounced. What we have all endured throughout the pandemic has made all of this feel more urgent: traveling out of isolation and interruption and into connection and continuity.

"Leaf" is a series of visual and text pieces consisting of macro-photos of disintegrating leaves layered with handwritten text—poem fragments, old journals, field notes, etc.—visible only through the holes in the leaves, or behind the leaves, disintegrating into the leaves.

This was a year spent thinking about integration and disintegration.

I love the word "leaf"—as a sheet of paper—and the idea of the leaf as a poem. And I love leaves as objects. Their short life cycle makes me want to notice them, examine and appreciate what many who walk the earth might not see. I had a sort of vision of poem fragments embedded in the leaves themselves, disintegrating, like lacunae. I imagined a poem that could only be read in small pieces through the holes in leaves. To me, this captured the sense of loss and the strange movement of time through the last year. I wanted to hold onto some part of that lost time.

The project both reflects and acccommodates the kind of thinking I am able to do right now: fragmented, interrupted. It requires a type of concentration that can stand up to noise, distraction, lack of solitude, and competing obligations. Though sustained writing is difficult, scraps of ideas, through the holes in last autumn's worn and tattered leaves, remain. Even if much of what we do sinks back into the earth, traces remain.

The text is nearly illegible, very small, and the pieces require the full engagement of the viewer to be truly seen. My goal is to create a space one enters, a full stop, a breath, and a mutual acknowledgement that we are here together.