I must honor the breath, be here with it and acknowledge it because if I don’t, it may choose not to honor me with its presence.

The breath contains the spectrum of emotion, from hysteria to calmness, captured in the audible rasp.

The breath is vapor and does not exist as liquid or solid. It is immaterial.

So why am I trying to make it material?

I find my way around the paper with the breath as my guide and the charcoal as my marker–allowing happenstance and planning equal weight in this process.

I use an email correspondence with myself to demand engagement with–myself. I like engaging with people, so I tricked myself into engaging with myself instead of escaping deep inside to a place where I can pretend there is no communication with the world-space. The breath gives me access to the world and gives the world access to me. Rilke writes, “complete interchange of our own essence with world-space.” World-space which we breath in, places we breath in and keep in, the little pieces of ourselves we deposit everywhere through our exhale, saying who we are and where we’ve been.

My work has always been a study of intuition, fueled by intuition, guided and read by intuition. But I have never looked directly at the intuition, dissected it and tried to define it as I find myself doing now. Stuck here with myself and my mind, I am sitting with this thing that allows me to operate in the world without a world in which to operate. Alone, I only hear myself, or try to hear myself, or try not to hear myself.

The Dancing Emilys, 2021

Breath