On LEAF

Meant to echo lacunae, fragments of handwritten text are partially legible, visible through the holes in leaves, and disintegrating into the (disintegrating) leaves. The macro-photographs and text are all original, and the source of the text varies from poems to field notes, essay fragments and journal entries.

The illegibility is meant to acknowledge the challenge of endeavoring to make something lasting, and the project chooses to hope that we can still reach each other somehow. Even if much of what we do sinks back into the earth, traces remain.

That the text requires magnification in print or radical zooming-in on a screen is reflective of my desire for a sense of intimacy and warmth between viewer/reader and the pieces— a hand reaching out, heat rising off— to mitigate the coldness of digitally-created work. A reader, holding the leaves (as in sheets) in their hand, will, I hope, feel as if they are holding the leaves (as in leaves) in their hand.