Drifting in My Mind

2023

notebook paper, graphite, thread, audio

dimensions variable

This work emerged from the idea to quilt a poem written on paper. I was interested in trying to hold legibility and illegibility together in a liminal space that both honored the text and created a visually stimulating object. The specificity of notebook paper was important to me; it referenced handwritten letters or grade school, learning to communicate in the first place. I kept the threads long because of how it gave a bodily affect: the paper became skin, the threads became hair. Each tendril contains a separate poem about connection: one about the proverbial “me,” the next about the proverbial “you,” and the last about when “me” and “you” come together. The installation pulled together with a QR code that connects to a YouTube link with no images, only audio, and headphones and sanitizing wipes. This installation indicated that the tendrils were intended to be viewed while listening to the audio. The audio is of myself reciting the poems while sewing with the rhythmic sounds of the sewing machine: piece, sew, cut; piece, sew, cut,… Doing so was difficult to multitask, resulting in seven takes full of stutters and mistakes. Every single stutter or misspeak was layered on top of the “right” take. I was interested in these “failures” to communicate: it reflected those moments when we try to put forward a more socially acceptable version of ourselves, but what comes out instead is a stuttering, stumbling, babbling, stammering, mumbling, bumbling, mess of words that tries and fails to reach out to others; it reflected the human vulnerability of faltering speech. It was meditative, even obsessive. It was lonely, longing.