Breath of Life (after Clarice Lispector), 2022

Letterpress with handset lead type on Maruju white and Ginwashi papers

9.5 inches in diameter (circular shaped piece)

Courtesy of the artist

"Breath of Life" combines text and letterpress gradients on very translucent papers. The words and colors hover in a visible but hard to fix place. The title comes from a novel by Clarice Lispector - a book of text fragments written near Lispector's death and compiled posthumously. This series draws fragments from her writing and influences from Hélène Cixous' work "Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing," in which she proposes that to begin writing, you must start with death.

Phrases like "The thing is inside out and the wrong way" and "My reverse is a splendor of velvety light" and the formal aspects of ghost prints and translucency have become meaningful within my own understandings of queer and trans experience. These are equally powerful as aesthetic and formal directions - how to create a print that incorporates inside-outness, shifting visibility, and reversal?

My work uses printmaking and resists pressure "to represent" in coherent, singular ways - instead thinking about embodiments, overlaps, and materiality. Identity isn't explicitly visible, but sensed - a collection of objects and texts hovering alongside us.