dear ordinary
an introduction
Dear Ordinary is a project built around a question I keep returning to, no matter what else I am working on: is the body you are living in — the ordinary one, in the ordinary day — already enough?
I am a visual artist. I draw and paint figures, people, the human form. I also sit with questions — about the body, about what gets called sacred and what gets left out, about grief, about what it means to make something when you don’t know yet what it will be. Dear Ordinary is where those two things happen together. The making and the questioning. Week by week, for 56 weeks.
The questions are big. What does the body know that the mind is slow to catch up to? What happens to a person who has been told, in one way or another, that their body is the wrong kind? What is the relationship between making something with your hands and learning to be present in a life? What does it mean to pay attention to the overlooked — the fog, the spider’s web, the shoreline at low tide — as a serious practice?
I don’t have answers. That’s not what this is.
There's something I've been circling for a long time, though. So much of contemplative practice lives in what won’t stay fixed — the self loosening its grip on who it thought it was, the boundary between me and not-me going soft, the sacred slipping past every container built to hold it. Sit with that long enough and the logic of it starts to look profoundly queer. Which means the body I was told was the wrong kind may be, in fact, the one that already holds the knowledge.
What I have is a space to work, and a sketchbook, and a set of questions. Each week I make something — drawings, paintings, studies, sometimes just marks — and I write, and I document the process as carefully as the work itself. The false starts are here. The weeks where nothing resolves. The slow accumulation of something I can’t really name.
Video description: A pale blue sky with wispy white clouds and several birds soaring in the distance.