BREATHING WOR(L)DS
June 2025
Silk + Sonic installation at South River Arts Studio Airstream, Atlanta GA
As I wrote out Breathing Words, I was pleased that I could slip an ‘l’ in between wor - ds and have it expand the phrase immediately.
They felt one in the same: words as worlds. The silent ‘l’ already implied for me.
I’ve been thinking about words lately. The limits I run into with them, yet also their ability to transport me when I need them to.
Like when trying to describe a smell that takes me to a memory: to a living, breathing parallel world just waiting for me to access it and step in.
What is that magic that animates words? That takes you from reading to reading, absorbing, feeling?
When we write things down, what is the permanence we seek? What am I trying to preserve?
I’m interested in the cross sections between words and language; in the overlapping folds of memory, body, mind and place;
how environments, both internal and outward, connect us to present, past and future worlds, real or imagined.
I’m interested in how the elements animate language & how using the seasons as containers for time
affect the way we can situate ourselves within time and memory.
I want to connect my memory to the air, and so I describe it with my nose.
An aliveness of mind and body remains in the november morning light, rooted in the rain, whispering along with the breeze.
Memory as a familiar friend, as a world that is living alongside me.
These daily acts of writing are futile but soothing spoonfuls of preservation, expansion and using words to the best of my
(and their) ability to feel and perhaps capture, but not contain, time.
They help me preserve what is and also remember what has been.
Using language that expands, becoming porous.