Progress Post: X-ray specs

Sorry, friends: this update post is so overdue!

My studio space is currently covered in thick sheets of card stock, the perfect medium for carrying the prints I made from an X-ray image of my chest. This print will form the basis of an autobiographical piece on the nature of the self.

Specifically, I want to investigate what one might have in mind when they ask questions about who they are "as a person." What does it mean to know yourself? How does my embodied experience of myself as a person in the world relate to this X-ray image of my physical body? Why does this image of my chest, lungs, and heart feel so familiar on the one hand and is simultaneously so different from how I think of myself?

Weekend Project: X-Rays!

I was inspired to work on a self-portrait this weekend after I discovered that I had received a copy of an x-ray scan of my own chest after I underwent a medical exam as part of my U.S. immigration screening process. How cool is that??!

I plan on incorporating collage and digital elements into the finished piece. I'll provide updates on my progress as I go. Happy Friday!

Experiments. First post. Starting up again. [...]

Hi all!

Welcome to the new blog on my website! I hope to be updating this feed on the reg with some thoughts, photos, etc about some of the art and writing I've been working on. Stay tuned for more updates on recent artwork, poems, and other fragments-in-progress! 

To kick things off on a fittingly experimental note: I recently read an article a couple weeks back about the mathematical structures of literature, and how variety in sentence length can affect the reader’s experience. I found the ideas in this article so fascinating that I decided to challenge myself to write a poem, short story, or other piece where the first sentence was one word, the second two, and so on up to ten words, then back to one again, with variable rules in place as to how the different lines ought to relate to each other. The rough stories that have come out so far are strange and bad, (just awful, really!), but they are super fun to write! Try it sometime!

The structure and pattern of the exercise gives the poems an interesting rhythm, and on the page they look like waves, pyramids, mazes, and other striking shapes. Maybe, if something good enough comes out of this process in the next little while, I'll post one of the results here on the blog - who knows?! In the meantime, I've been really happy with how such a little experiment has started my creative writing juices flowing again after such a long hiatus! I credit this exercise with inspiring me to finish my most recent short story Memory, and with prompting me to write the cyclical poem A train receding into the distance. in my Poetry Journal. Definitely looking forward to seeing what shapes my future writing projects will take!