The Word
Works exploring the hierarchal nature of conceptual language and the selection of the literati.
Who is granted access to shape and disseminate our collective thinking? Who has the right to speak—and at what level, on what platform? Who authors The Word, and who subscribes to it? These works reimagine publishing as an act of creative autonomy and self-authorization.
Conceptual Book Launch
Exhibition & Book Release / March 7, 2023 / Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A conceptual book launch in which every copy was handmade. After months of telling people I was writing a book—and letting them assume what that meant—they arrived to find a wall covered in self-made books. The intent was to expand perceptions of what it means to be published and to challenge the idea that publishing grants exclusive access to legitimacy. Traditional structures suggest that for a work to be considered valid, it must be selected and disseminated by an external authority. This project disrupted that notion, presenting publication as something as simple—and radical—as making copies and distributing them. Creativity is not just about making the work; it’s also about how we release it into the world. Instead of waiting for the right set of variables, the right moment, or the right person to legitimize it, we can reclaim creative agency by resourcing the tools and materials we have right now.
This work is a reminder that we all have the right to give platform to our own voice’s expression.
Letters to the Self, for Remembering
Art Book / March 2023 /Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Taking creative work from under the bed and making it public.
A single volume born from 6.5 years of journal writing—lines harvested, rearranged, and re-bound into a coherent form—and the paper for the covers was made from their remnants. Lines were lifted out of context and rearranged without regard for original chronology, the writing stylistically taking the form of a nonlinear collage. The result is a layered, intuitive composition that reveals emotional through-lines rather than sequential events. This method creates a chorus of self across time. Certain refrains return like echoes. Patterns emerge not through plot but through resonance—inviting the reader to feel rather than follow. This work is rooted in care, curation, and a desire to integrate the fragmented self into something newly whole. This book is both archive and artifact, a loop of memory turned into material.
The work released during Conceptual Book Launch.
Book Introduction & Project Statement
In December I moved into my studio and unpacked boxes of old journals, scraps of paper I had
been holding onto, and began reading and rediscovering parts of myself.
These were all little paper mountains of words that I had accumulated around me, like a squirrel thinking she would come back to it in another season, but then forgetting, moving on to another nut.
Finally, I took shovel and rake, sickle and sythe and harvested.
Remembered myself.
Found appreciation for my mind and my way of thinking about and experiencing things.
It was like I was reading someone else. I liked the writer.
I ripped out pages of old notebooks, harvested lines, then soaked and ground the paper fibers into pulp that I made new paper with.
Re-processed, re-purposed.
All my notebooks went back to late 2016 when I ended a nomadic period and settled down again.
And they stretched until now.
I saw patterns.
I saw changes.
I saw myself shedding.
I saw myself saying the words I needed to hear to move on from one thing to the next, to be brave, to let go, and let my hands be free to grab onto something else.
I saw things I needed to remember.
So instead of letting it all go back to mountains and holes in the ground, I pieced it together into one piece that I can easily re-read to remember myself when I forget.
The lines of this book are a jumble of thoughts from 6.5 years. They are from 4 different relationships, but they read as if from one… because really, they are from one: my relationship with myself. I took things that did not necessarily go together and made them linear; I took the circles of my life and stretched them out to be flat, one tail end to another, or one belly cut off and attached to a head.
This project was a way for me to make use of all my creative mountains that were just sitting there. To take one output and resource it as a tool to create another output.
To create purpose.
To create.
Visitor to the artist’s studio shops handmade paper supplies on the DIY self-publishing wall.
Full gallery below from Conceptual Book Launch of Letters to the Self, plus the companion workshop, Self-Publishing Goes DIY
Self-Publishing Goes DIY
Workshop / March 12, 2023 / Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
A participatory extension of Letters to the Self and Conceptual Book Launch, this workshop expanded on the premise of Conceptual Book Launch, moving from witnessing to making—from idea to embodiment. Where the exhibition challenged the authority of traditional publishing by presenting handmade books as legitimate, this workshop offered the tools to do it yourself. It asked: what becomes possible when we stop waiting to be chosen and choose ourselves instead?
Participants brought fragments: a piece of writing, a question, a reflection. Through simple folding, cutting, and binding techniques, they transformed their words into self-made books—artifacts of their own voice. They left with a self-bound artifact and, more importantly, a redefined relationship to authorship.
Publishing, in this context, is not about mass production or commercial distribution. It is about voice. About visibility. About taking up space in the cultural record on our own terms. By removing the gatekeepers, we created a space where everyone could be both author and publisher, where legitimacy was self-defined.
This workshop dismantled the myth that publishing is something reserved for the chosen. It extended the logic of Letters to the Self by asking: what creative resources are already sitting dormant in your life? What mountains of thought are waiting to be transformed?
In sharing the methods behind my own book—harvesting old journals, reprocessing paper, reshaping narrative—I offered a model for others to reclaim their voice and material as legitimate, already enough. No agent, no publisher, no perfect moment required.
Each book made that day was a declaration:
I am the author of my own remembering.
