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. Desire, in the form of repetitive footfalls, connects.

The works in this series are about connection and the innate human desire for interdependency that persists despite powerful cultural messaging promoting fundamentalist versions of independence.

They are also about my diasporic identity, which creates a constant sense of home-seeking and a simultaneous desire to wander, especially on paths that have been made by feet, hooves, paws, claws, carapaces… rather than by bureaucracies. These works are about walking as a form of home, walking as a form of knowing — footfall as knowledge, footfall as belief. 




These paintings are made with eggs, rainwater, and natural and synthetic pigments. The pigments in each painting are sourced from the places by which they are inspired, using bones, rocks, plants, trash, and water. All of these mediums strive to encounter each other. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Driven by gravity and capillary action, they forcefully seek each other out when I place them on the paper, seeking new combinations and forms. These works are the result of an ongoing experiment in listening to the materials’ desire in the form of their movement.

In these works, I am an amateur translator and choreographer.