Everything is Everything

Everything Is Everything

Handmade paper (abacá, cotton rag, garden soil, Lake Michigan water), video projection, cotton line, clothespins, breeze, light
Looping video (1:30), variable dimensions, 2025

This work is made from many things, and from the truth that no thing stands alone.

Each sheet of paper was hand pulled using abacá fiber from the Philippines, recycled cotton rag, soil from the garden, and water from Lake Michigan. The resulting sheets— hold the imprint of my effort and energy, the heat of the sun, the push and pull of the wind, humidity, and gravity. The paper remembers and is made by more than I could ever shape alone.

I hang the sheets on lines, the soft arcs recalling the lines where laundry has been hung for generations—spaces shaped by the invisible labor of women. I’ve come to see the rhythm, the devotion in all that labor. The hanging, tending, folding—it’s all prayer, it’s all care.

A looping video is projected onto one of the sheets, showing these same papers as they once moved beneath the tree under which I made and dried them. The image is soft, breath-like. The projected paper becomes both screen and body—holding a memory of what passed through it. Like the rest of the installation, it asks for presence, not perfection.

Each sheet carries its own quirks—creases, warps, uneven edges. I do not correct them. These are not flaws. They are evidence. They are what make the paper—and me—whole. We are shaped by what we’ve passed through. Our ups and downs. Apparent wins and losses. Confusion.  Love.  The wind, the weather, every shifting moment. None of it is wasted.

This work is a step toward peace. The act of making the paper, of being with it fully, is my practice of surrender—what Peace Pilgrim described as giving oneself over completely to love and truth.  In that spirit, I offer this work in service. It is not meant to impress. It is meant to invite. To offer a moment of stillness. A way in. A gentle remembering that we belong to each other, to the land, to something larger than all of us from which we all come, to which we all go, that which holds us together.

The peace I seek begins here—with my hands in water, my feet in soil, my breath moving with the wind. I invite you to step into that with me.

Everything is everything.