About the Small Books

This work was born from a long-standing series focused on celestial bodies. These books take the form of koans, adages or aphorisms that are open-ended instead of closed and prescriptive. They act as responses to unasked questions, are cryptic, and have indeterminate metaphorical capacity. On a literal level, they describe features of celestial bodies, and how they are experienced by a human body.

My interest in celestial bodies started with the moon. I wanted to topple or trouble the heavy, problematic symbolism already associated with it (romanticism of a nature-based romanticism and "the divine feminine", namely)[1]. It is also deeply tied up with the lightness/darkness, purity/impurity, good/bad binaries, replete with supremist undertones. All these need reworking, especially in something so everyday.

I drew and drew the moon, and it started to seem like a venn diagram of itself + the earth's shadow. I found the idea of that shadow strangely compelling, drawing and redrawing this image as a way to think about overlap, and also the space between how something is experienced and the physical principles underlying it (for example, the shadow of the moon thought about as a darkness on the face of the moon, and not as a darkness intercepted by the moon as it diminishes into empty space).

Later explorations into the sun followed a similar method. Premised on scientific research into the physical processes at play, I would overlay those with thinking about how these process felt, and how those experiences manifest on the level of metaphor (both live and dead).

The books pictured are descriptions of sunlight/shadow,  being on a moving planet, and the planet in relation to the sun

[1] see biddytarot.com’s description of the high priestess for an example: “The crescent moon at her feet symbolises her connection with the divine feminine, her intuition and subconscious mind, and the natural cycles of the moon”

​

​

​

​

​

​