Soft stone monuments
clay, black walnuts, charales, found assorted rocks, shellac, chalk, and materials from Lake Michigan including basalt, limestone, granite, mudstone, agate, vesicular basalt, jasper, gabbro, diorite, sandstone, slate, gneiss, concrete, clay brick, and iron slag
Each monument is an eroding form that is more like a body than an altar, a body being a collection of minerals and organisms in a general shape that is said to be mine.
My soft stone monuments are dedicated to the living memory of another world, memory being the place where I store a collection of possibilities. The fragments of what I have sensed, known, and absorbed are materials outside of time that can be held for remembrance or reconstructed into something wanted and not yet formed. Some of the monuments give shape to loss, fear, and destruction, mine and ours. Others materialize transformation for our collective future. The hard parts press against the soft parts. Like bodies, they are permeable, porous, and impermanent.
For Emma Deboncoeur (in the night forlorn)
My friend and lover who took her own life, my need to understand her last living moments, the care she gave and needed. The heat of my memories of her.
Soft stone language
Rocks to mourn the nationalist destruction of the yiddish language. Rocks to hold jewish diaspora.
Fertile monument
A soft monument to my fears and a visualization of trust.
Soft monument to the shell of the last prison
Look at this monument and see a world without prisons. What does safety look like? What does care look like? What does justice look like?
For the organisms that are the composition of my body
In gratitude to the bacteria, fungi, mitochondria, viruses and minerals that move in and out of me and collaboratively make up this shape called my body, which is materially more theirs than it is mine.
Monument after borders
Look at this monument and see a world without borders. What does home look like? What does movement look like? What does land justice look like?
Rip rap (melted glacier / lost to the lake)
As temperatures and water levels rise, the lake bed erodes, the water moves more forcefully against land, erases the space between lake and land, and takes more bodies into its waves.