I am thankful for the words of others.

Reading is a place to find worlds for the sentiments I only know how to express visually. In doing so, I find resonant phrases or that guide me in the studio and frequently integrate them into the titles of artworks.   

Here are some of the words that have found me recently:

to be a bay inspired (or perhaps more truthfully lovingly borrowed) from a passage in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.

“I've started to think of painting as a way to build new cellular memory...or at least the space for new cellular memory to be able to grow” - A’Driane Nieves

“The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.” - Kara Walker