For Lack of a Better Word ruminates on what it means to use a surface that was already used because one feels so strongly the compulsion to put something down, lest one forgets it. How does one face the possibility of erasure and leave a memento of one’s impermanence behind – pulled from the (im)material remains of what was once already there?

While these considerations are at work, they also hold the knowledge that the inscription on the surface will never be one text, read so many ways and in so many iterations. It does not matter whether the surface is read or not because the work is in the compulsion to write. This, in turn, directs one toward the reader’s want to read and the fact of impending (il)legibility.

The act of pulling back and extracting ink creates the work. This is not simply about the things one gives, but rather, what is left behind on the paper, ‘taking form’ by pulling ink through the cuts or negations of a silk surface.  

For Lack of a Better Word does not seek to understand the limitlessness of meaning, nor define the limits and possibilities of its contentious histories. Instead, each of these works exist as textual and visual extractions. The act is a writing process that takes from and gives to that which is there. The medium is a provocation that rests between appearance – ink, silk screen, paper, forms over forms ad infinitum – and the (un)disclosed.  

This body of work, for lack of a better word, writes what it is not – not calligraphy, not figures, not palimpsests, not paintings, not poems, not prints.