Novel (2026) Digital Print
Novel (work in progress) is a rediscovered first draft of the novel I wrote early in my PhD. Repurposed as a visual field, its layers of fictional text hold the residues of the writer’s subjectivity at a moment in time. All creative work is, to some degree, a snapshot of self. Novel refuses to abandon the messiness of those auto-fictional residues, the parts we’re trained to throw away, instead redeploying them as a visual work to be held up for an alternative audience. Conceived for room-scale installation.
Reduction (2026) Digital Print
Paired with Novel, Reduction explores the stripping of the messy, subjective self from a work — cleansed and bleached of selfhood to make it palatable, saleable, acceptable to the institution and to the widest possible audience. Here the self is gradually removed, growing more ordered and familiar under the constraints of genre, before emptying entirely into clean white space: acceptable to everyone but containing no one.
Across the surface, my own handwritten writing and production notes, made in the making, fight against the emptying out of self. They are the anxious traces of a self resisting its own cleansing and removal, and of the deep unease of trying to make work palatable enough for institutional acceptance. Conceived for room scale installation.