Details

The dirt that's tracked in from outdoor boots, the way residues and marks are left on removed tape, the rings of scum and grime that develop around the drain, a reminder of what's left and what's gone.

There's beauty in dwelling. To dwell is to look at something and see what is no longer there. To see a shadow, a ghost, a reflection, and to vividly feel the presence of what's not present.

I recently learned about evolutionary anarchronism, the ways in which a plant coevolved with a megafauna that is now extinct, so a plant might bear giant fruits that no living animal eats, designed for a giant sloth that no longer roams the earth. It feels tragic and beautiful, all this energy to create a fruit that has no audience. But at the same time, every time the plant bears fruit, it's a reminder of what once was. Each rotting fruit is an echo of a giant sloth that once ate it.

A while ago I was working on some LEGO relief prints, and in some ways a relief print is a type of printing that specializes on dwells and lingers, it's what sticks after pressing an inked surface onto a paper or other material. After I was done doing some prints, the ink roller that I was using to roll ink onto the LEGO still had some ink left. It felt wasteful to just wash it off, so I rolled the ink onto a blank piece of paper. It created a fingerprint of sorts, an identification of what's left, a relief print of the tool itself.

To dwell is to make a dwelling, a dangerous game in which the remnants become the thing. It's all that's left, and so it feels like it's all that was. It's almost like the process is the journey except the destination is the in the rearview mirror. It's poetic but in reverse. I'm not sure how to feel about it, sometimes it feels like glorifying and coping. If we see beauty in decay, do we stop planting and blooming? If we learn to celebrate scraps, do we forget the hunger? Do we forget fullness?