A word or a phrase is chosen. Something that needs to become true. It is something being wrestled with and returned to again and again in the way we return to anything that will not let us go.

The paper size is determined first. The scale of the piece determines how long it will take, how many times it will be written, how many months of sitting down and beginning again. These pieces take between four months and two years to complete. They are not made quickly. They cannot be.

Then the writing begins.

I Love You. Be Kind. Courage. Peace. Forgive. Empathy. Flow Like Water. How Are You Helping? There's Enough For All Of Us. I Already Have It All. You'll Find Your Way Home. It Will Be Okay. What Are You Chasing?/Why? Just Be You.

Each phrase is written between 2,000 and 120,000 times depending on the paper size. Written by hand, the same words filling the page until the surface becomes something else entirely. Eventually the phrase stops being language and becomes more texture and landscape, something you stand in front of and feel before you read.

But the center of the page is only half the work.

In the margins, in pencil, the artist writes what the meditation brings up on any given day of making. Not what the phrase means in theory but what it triggers in practice. All the resistance, the doubts, unexpected grief is noted. The dark humor of sitting with a word for the four hundredth day and suddenly arguing with it. Writing I Love You 35,000 times and asking in the margin — does that include me? Writing I Don't Love Doing This Today on a Tuesday in month seven and writing it anyway.

The margin comments are the other half of the conversation — they are the raw, unguarded record of a human being working toward something they do not yet fully believe, on the days they are certain, and on the days they are not. It’s where the practice meets the person.

This is part endurance art, part devotional practice, part confession. The three are not separate. Each meditation begins as something the artist needs to hear. A search for a truth, becomes instruction being written into the body through the repetition of the hand. The margins record what happens along the way. When the piece is done the words have been lived with long enough to become something close to belief. The margins show you the cost of that.

The finished object is evidence of that journey. What the viewer sees is a surface dense with language, with the intention at the center, the truth in the margins, and the whole of it a record of months of someone's life. Months of returning, insisting that this word or phrase is worth the whole of the paper and the whole of the time.

It is.