Desire Lines 11 // rainwater, egg, natural and synthetic pigment on handmade paper, 22 x 30″, 2022

Desire Lines are paths that follow the shortest or most easily navigable route between an origin and destination; they are driven by a desire to expediently arrive. In urban areas, desire lines stray from sidewalks, cutting across gridded grass or dirt, making visible the areas of our world built to act as background, areas that are usually too mundane to be seen. Desire, in the form of repetitive footfalls, makes them navigable, seeable.

The word “desire” can be traced back to the Latin phrase de sidere, meaning “from the stars.” So to desire is to wait for what the stars might bring. To desire is to wait for what the stars, those ancient concatenations of hydrogen and helium, those luminous spheroids of plasma held together by their own gravity, might deliver, might provide. Stars provide constellations and asterisms. In doing so, they provide myths and dreams. They provide crucial orientation that made the world navigable. They provide company and light. Have you ever looked up at a starry sky and felt immensely not-alone?

Stars provide orientation, direction, and remote connection. Desire lines connect. The works in this series are about exploring and connecting, about the innate human desire for interdependency that persists despite powerful cultural messaging promoting maniacal versions of independence. They are also about my ongoing desire to wander, to tread paths that have been made by feet, hooves, paws, claws, carapaces… rather than by bureaucracies. These works are about walking as a form of knowing — footfall as knowledge, footfall as belief.

These paintings are made with eggs, rainwater, and natural and synthetic pigments. All of these mediums strive to encounter each other. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Driven by gravity and capillary action, they actually seek each other out when I place them on the paper, seek new combinations and forms. These works are the result of an ongoing experiment in listening to their desire in the form of their movement. In these works, I am amateur translator and choreographer.