Memory of a Larger Mind is an interdisciplinary project that gives form to the grief held in specific places, allowing it to transform. The project takes the form of paintings, sculptures, installations, cyanotypes, films, community events, and three books: Protocols: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025), Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2026), and Light / Remains. The project began in 2019 and is ongoing.

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To make this work, I travel to sacrifice zones: sites of layered historical and ecological violence such as former concentration and internment camps, disappeared sacred sites, previously glaciated landscapes. I gather what I find there: stones, plants, bones, water. 

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These materials become natural pigments, made in community workshops open to everyone.The process is playful and exploratory — even workshops focused on emotionally complex processes (turning a plant that grew on a mass grave into paint, for example) are always full of camaraderie and laughter. Curiosity brings lightness, which brings new insights into violent pasts. New possibilities emerge. 

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The resulting pigments form palettes of place: collections of color that hold the changed memories of a site and its people. These pigments lead to art reflecting the history and future of these communities — used directly in paintings and installations, and also functioning as an archive, a reference library that informs the work.​

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The project understands genocide and ecocide as inextricably linked — both expressions of the same logic that reduces living things, human and other-than-human, to instruments or obstacles. My own family history primed my attention to this: I am descended from survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and I grew up inheriting memories I did not live through firsthand.

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But the postmemories this project works with are not only mine, and the sites are not only Jewish. Violence and resilience are shared inheritances. This project helps catalyze the regeneration in these places that is already underway.

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Making color from places of harm is one way to insist on the aliveness of matter, the memory embedded in the earth, and the possibility — never final, always ongoing — of transformation.