Memory of a Larger Mind transforms violence to love, desecration to beauty. The project metabolizes memories of genocide and ecocide to facilitate personal and collective healing.

 

Globally dispersed and multimodal, the project consists of a series of natural pigments, paintings, sculptures, installations, community events, and three books. In the words of Walter Benjamin, “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.” Regardless of the form I’m working in, this project’s medium is memory. 

 

From globally dispersed places of heightened memory, I forage stones, flowers, shells, and wildlife bones which I transform to pigments. These pigments form palettes of place, colors which hold the transformed memories of a place. 

 

The pigments are often made in community pigment-making workshops. No special skills are needed to make pigments and these workshops are open to all. The process is playful, exploratory, and allows for free-flowing and guided conversations about memory, inheritance, identity, and place. 

 

The pigments made in these workshops are then used to make paintings, sculptures, and installations exploring memory, place, deep time, and intergenerational memory.

 

Poems and essays are written in conjunction with the visual art, each informing the other.

 

The places of which the pigments are made are places of desecration, sanctity, and resilience. Each has a history of sociopolitical, cultural, and ecological violence.

 

The places include: former concentration camps and internment camps in Europe and the United States, disappeared synagogues in eastern Europe; previously glaciated spots in the Arctic and Alaska, abandoned mines in various worldwide locations, my mother’s garden in Vermont, a community garden in Oregon, logged and/or burned forests in the Pacific Northwest, and buried or polluted watersheds in various worldwide locations.

 

This list is intentionally diverse. When the world is viewed as a cyclic system of matter and memory transforming again and again, geographies blur, which is part of the project’s fascination: when a pigment made from an Auschwitz brick meets a pigment made from an Arctic stone, what happens? What new memories are made? And what does it look like? And what does a viewer feel when viewing this interaction in a painting?

 

This list of places might sound overwhelmingly sad. Each of these places does indeed hold a form of difficult memory. But each of these places is also in the process of healing, recreating itself, which is what a body does: as soon as an injury occurs, the body begins its healing. The body of the earth is no different, engaged in an endlessly creative process of reimagination. This project catalyzes and shares the creative regeneration already underway. 

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“I believe we are necessary,” writes poet Lia Purpura of humans, “and that restive powers need to be touched, moved, acknowledged into being. And that the act of enlivening matters.”

 

Memory of a Larger Mind stems from the belief that “shifting restive powers” and “the act of enlivening” might be good roles for a human at this moment in time, when we are inflicting so much harm upon each other and the more-than-human world. To shift restive powers is to enliven, to heal memories, make new memories, and to insist on resilience. 

 

By wandering into the recesses of traumatized memory and using vessels of transformation (pigments, water, poems, art, and community events), Memory of a Larger Mind shifts restive powers in order to help enliven the world.

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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.