Consisting of a series of pigments, paintings, installations, community events, and two books, this project aims for personal and collective healing by transmuting ecocide and genocide to generative questions, conversations, and immersive beauty. 

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From globally dispersed urban and wild places—a former concentration camp, previously glaciated spots, desecrated sacred sites, and other sacrifice zones—I forage bones, stones, flowers, and debris with which I make pigments. The pigments are used to make large-scale, abstract paintings—layered maps of time and place that explore deep time, intergenerational memory, and the “memory” of other-than-human entities such as rocks, plants, and water. Poems and essays are written in conjunction with the paintings, each informing the other. 

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Lia Purpura writes of humans, “I believe we are necessary, and that restive powers need to be touched, moved, acknowledged into being. And that the act of enlivening matters.” This project stems from the belief that “shifting restive powers” might be a good role for a human at this moment in time, when humans are perpetuating and enduring so much harm inflicted upon each other and the more-than-human world. To shift restive powers is to enliven, to push back on the many forms of deadening and to insist on resilience. 

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Shifting restive powers involves a confusion of tenses and an opening of senses. It involves a relinquishment of linearity and easily traceable outcomes, and an embrace of confusion’s capacity to heal.

 

This project wanders into the recesses of traumatized memory and uses vessels of transmutation—pigments, water, and poems—to shift those restive powers.

 

Because every body is dynamic—homeostatic, never static—I offer these memories bodies in which they might transform. This project is the trace of their changing.

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Two forthcoming books will be published as part of this project: MEMORY OF A LARGER MIND (Omnidawn, 2028) and LIGHT / REMAINS (Bored Wolves, 2026). Excerpts from MEMORY OF A LARGER MIND are published here.