Breathing on This Land for Another Day
Work in progress, 2026
Handmade paper, ash, thread, graphite and sound
Dimensions variable.
This study is approximately 4’x1.5’. The fully realized version will be a bit larger than 1:1 human scale, approx. 6’x6’ and comprised of a thousand circles of handmade paper.

Breathing on This Land for Another Day begins with the ash of immigration documents. After receiving a visa that allowed him to remain in the United States, a friend ritually burned the extensive paperwork that had been required to secure it. He entrusted the resulting ash to me, along with permission to work with language drawn directly from his writing about the experience.

I am incorporating the ash into small, circular sheets of handmade paper. Some hold words written in graphite or embroidered in thread: broken paths, directional marks, interrupted circles. In others, language is pressed so faintly into the paper that it cannot be read. In a few, words are carried within the pulp itself, present in the material but never available to the eye. Red and gold threads move across the pale surfaces and then continue beyond them, hanging loose like unfinished routes. The individual fragments are suspended from pale linen threads, allowing them to rotate, overlap and respond to subtle currents of air.

Suspension operates here as both a physical structure and a political condition. It evokes the extended uncertainty of waiting within immigration systems, when the right to remain, move, work and imagine a future is held within an administrative process. At the same time, the installation considers the ways governments, archives and museums name, classify and fix people and objects within systems of knowledge. These fragments remain tethered, but they are not pinned. Their continual movement resists the stable view of the specimen. No single position offers complete access.

The work's approach to language is informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha's concept of "speaking nearby," rather than speaking about or on behalf of another person. Édouard Glissant's articulation of a "right to opacity" also shapes the work's ethics. Opacity is not treated as absence or refusal, but as the possibility of relation without complete disclosure. One fragment carries his words stitched so they are not legible as letters, present in the work and withheld from it at once. The viewer is offered traces of an experience without being granted possession of it. The words remain my friend's. The work holds them while preserving his agency and privacy.

Kimsooja's performances and video works, particularly A Needle Woman and A Laundry Woman – Yamuna River, India, provide another important point of connection. Her use of stillness, duration and embodied witnessing helps me think about how an artwork can remain present before a complex human reality without attempting to master or resolve it.

The current installation is a small study for a much larger suspended field. I envision the next iteration containing as many as one thousand individually formed paper elements and occupying an architectural volume substantially larger than the human body. Rather than being observed as a discrete object, the installation will take up space insistently. Viewers will encounter it as an atmosphere and a shifting collective body, moving around and beneath a field that alternately obscures and reveals itself.

As the papers turn and touch, they produce a quiet rustling. This sound will become an integral part of the expanded installation. It is created not by any single element, but through proximity, movement and contact. Fragile individually, the fragments together form a body capable of altering the space around it.

The work asks what it means to breathe on this land for another day, and what forms of permission, endurance and transformation make that breath possible.