Circles Without End
A restless geometry
Circles take up a lot of space in my work, and for me they carry symbolic and metaphoric meaning. I find a lot of kinship and solace in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Circles. For Emerson, the circle is not just a shape but a law of becoming, an edge that exists only to be surpassed. “The life of man,” he writes, “is a self-evolving circle… rushing on all sides outward to new and larger circles, and that without end.” My work is this metaphor.
With my work, this reads less like philosophy and more like operating instructions I think due to its abstract repetitiveness. It is time heavy, incremental, built one mark at a time develops through this same restless geometry. Each piece begins at a point, becomes a ring, becomes a field that exceeds anything I could have authored on paper. What starts as a precise act of control inevitably enters a trance like state of becoming and motion, where intention begins to behave like pattern and pattern behaves like a system. The circle expands, then expands again. It doesn’t always happen smoothly, but exceeding what the previous ring could hold.
Each Mark as an Event and a System
In handwork, it’s tempting to treat a stitch as singular gesture, one unit of labor. But the moment a second stitch is made, relationship begins. Line, angle, tension: all are now relative. By the tenth stitch, I’m no longer simply placing marks; I’m negotiating with a developing structure that already has expectations.
