From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

I have been struggling for days to write my artist statement/ project description, my bio, even to title this project that's trapped inside itself, a kernel in the center of its own stasis. I somehow don't want to name it, pin it down. I want to keep it perfect in my head. What if it falls flat in open air? What if that perfect shattering and falling against concrete sound that rings in my ears is dull and disappointing in living breathing space? Brokenness and repair.

I am still thinking about the closing of my gifting project, that Rumi poem.

how long will you make clay pitchers / that have to be broken to enter you?

There something I am afraid will be lost in translation. I talk about it in its mundane details, but it is not that for me. It is an opportunity to glimpse into the possibility of a new organization of meaning. It is the way things are always breaking down and building up at the same time. It is the making and remaking of meaning. It is systems that no longer work in their wholeness, things that have to be pieced together from what remains, from what has been worn and torn and shattered, loved into loose strands.

There was a way in which the gifting project started a conversation within me, of attachment to objects, of the relationship between object and meaning, the way the story and the thing weave in and out of relationship with one another. The object, relieved of its meaning, the meaning bereft of object, the meaning feeling its way toward new object, the object birthing new meaning. The way the stories live both within and without the vessels we use to carry them. Something. There is something there. It is only whole and complete when I close my eyes and don't put words to it... but it's there.