Sometimes we go for a bit and then come back

2024 Series of nine 6×6″ woodblock prints

Ink on paper

This series depicts the house where I grew up, rendered nine times through shifting color and mark. I wanted to access memory not through narrative but through the body, to let my hand move according to what it held in muscle and nerve rather than what the mind could articulate. Some marks emerged inquisitive and methodical, tracing slow accumulation. Some were violent and cathartic, the blade tearing through wood. Others arrived orderly and soothing: small repeated gestures.

The colors follow a synesthetic grammar, mapping memory onto hue. In nature, bright colors warn of danger—toxicity declaring itself to predators. And yet we are drawn to them. This tension lives at the center of the work: the pull toward what was vivid, the knowledge of what was unsafe, the impossibility of separating beauty from harm.

The house holds still at the center of each print. What shifts is the quality of attention brought to it. We return to the sites that made us, and each time we arrive in a different body. Not the place changed, but ourselves. Shortly after my mother died, she spoke to me in a dream: sometimes we go for a bit and then come back. To return again and again to what cannot be fully held, as if repetition might teach us how to carry it: this is the work of grief.