In this series of drawings, I focus on drawings as devotional objects. These pieces were made as letters and sent in the mail to a loved one who was living across the country. They consist of notation and gesture. I consider the difficulty of loving across an expanse where the most fruitful activity is focusing on what is in front of you, to build towards another and within the structure of one’s heart. How drawing soothes and steadies. The drawings do not fill space or attempt language, but document time. Marks are repeated and time simply passes. The drawings are shown as 35mm photographs taken before they were sent. Anne Carson’s writing on how eros functions within letters gives context to this act. She states that letters, “make the absent present,” they contain a vitality and as they are reread the words are restored as truth.

Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in it those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is literally not there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is .. and what could be. Letters project the ideal on a screen of the actual. From within letters, Eros acts.
(Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet p.92)

Through these photographs, I study the environment of the third person, an exercise of the role of the letter as an object traded, its’ life before it is sent and the imagined life in the second pair of hands. (2019)