INCARNATE, 2021

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who need to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, your eyes have dropped out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

These paintings begin where sight gives out. The first image is a photograph taken with water on the lens, the landscape blurred and drowned, the world seen through a small flood. Over that softened scene, glass is laid like a second skin. The hard surface is then scored and etched, as if the hand were cutting channels for memory to run through.

Layers follow, one after another: pigment, water, pencil, text. Each pass is laid down and then taken back with light sanding, the way a shoreline is drawn and erased by every tide. Nothing stays pure. Every color is troubled; every mark bears the ghost of what came before. The aim is not a clean record but a marker of history—something layered, washed away, and reapplied until the surface feels as worked and weathered as a stone handled for years.

The paintings stand in for history, for the land, and for the small, stubborn ways we see the world. Their flaws are not mistakes but evidence. Scratches, blurs, and slips in the surface become stand‑ins for the scars of a life, those places where experience has broken the skin and then healed in a new, rough shape. The brokenness is the beauty; the damage is what catches the light.

Threaded through the layers runs text: a quiet braid of prayers, historical fragments, and geological data. The words lie there like fossils and liturgy, like field notes and whispered petitions, all pressed into the same ground. In the end, each painting holds a weathered record of looking and losing, of covering and uncovering. It is not a single image but a stack of moments, all still faintly present, like voices layered in the air.