Memory of a Larger Mind is an interdisciplinary project that transforms difficult memories embedded in places where violence has occurred. It takes the form of community events, natural pigments, paintings, sculptures, films, installations, and three books of poetry and essays (PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, published in 2025, Memory of a Larger Mind forthcoming in 2026, and Light / Remains in 2027). The project began in 2020 and is ongoing.

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To create this work, I travel to sites of heightened memory: former concentration and internment camps in Europe and the United States; disappeared sacred sites and gravesites; and previously glaciated landscapes. These are places marked by desecration and resilience. They’re culturally, politically, and ecologically damaged—and they’re also actively regenerating. My work is to help catalyze the regeneration already underway. 

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To do so, I collect stones, plants, shells, and bones. These materials are transformed into natural pigments in workshops open to everyone. No special skills are required. The process is playful and exploratory, allowing for both guided and spontaneous conversations about memory, inheritance, identity, and place. Even though the workshops focus on emotionally and ethically complex processes—turning a plant that grew on a mass grave, for example, into paint—they are always full of camaraderie and laughter. Pigment-making is a fun and exploratory process which encourages the emergence of childlike curiosity. This curiosity brings lightness, which brings new insights into violent pasts. New possibilities and new futures emerge. 

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The pigments made in these workshops form palettes of place: collections of colors that hold the transformed memories of a community and a place. These pigments are used to create art reflecting the history and future of these communities.

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During the pigment-making process, I’m also gathering language through interviews, facilitated exchanges in the workshops, and informal conversations with scholars, artists, and community members. These interactions function not only as research, but also as practices of relationship building and community formation. Research for the project also includes reading across disciplines including: sociology, political science, environmental studies, history, art history, and poetry. Poems and essays emerge from all these encounters.

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Though geographically and historically distinct, the project’s sites share a common thread of genocide and ecocide: political, cultural, and environmental violence, which always occur in tandem or succession. One aim of the project is to challenge the widespread but erroneous separation of environmental issues from sociopolitics—a division rooted in the equally false notion that humans and nature are distinct entities.

 

By bringing materials from disparate sites into dialogue, the project also engages questions about materiality: what happens when a pigment made from an Auschwitz brick meets one made from Arctic stone? What new memories, meanings, and perceptions emerge?

 

Beneath this question is the project’s hopeful understanding of a place: a place is a shared vision made of matter and memory which is constantly being reshuffled and reimagined. This project spurs that reimagination to be more vital and just.  

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PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is part of this project and two forthcoming books will be published as part of this project: Memory of  a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2026) and LIGHT / REMAINS (Bored Wolves, 2026). Excerpts from Memory of a Larger Mind are published here and here.