Each of the 15 editions is mounted with a unique cyanotype fronispiece print on cotton fabric.
(print size: 9.25 in. x 8.5 in.)

THESE THINGS grew from an archive of objects in my Rome studio during 2017/18. While developing the project editions, Covid-19 struck and impacted every aspect of humanity, deepening a collective need to examine memory, truth, and tactile aspects of our world. Time (and our perception of it) changed, as well. This work speaks to both endurance and uncertainty: part time-capsule, part memorial, perpetually in flux.

Exterior: Each edition displays a unique cyanotype print frontispiece on cotton fabric.
Interior: Moab entrada rag natural 190, double sided paper. Inkjet prints include: 11 photographs of original manual artworks; 5 digitally produced artworks; 7 original photographs; and 3 photographs of archived objects. Two interior pages are original cyanotype prints on silk. (Every edition is unique.)
The front and back liner sheets are handmade Abaca pulp paper with custom watermark.
Poem by Joanna Klink, The birds have disappeared into trees, from the selection of poems entitled NIGHT SKY. Published in the collection The Nightfields by Penguin Random House LLC.

THESE THINGS is an archive of objects and experiences—most of them hand-held articles—presented in actual size. Despite their straightforward presentation, the things in THESE THINGS resist labels, positing that nothing is as it appears, and that no thing is just one thing.

"I was living in Rome in 2017, relieved to distance myself from the U.S. political/media circus back home, although I couldn't shake the shock and disbelief of the previous year's election. I'd brought some things from home—stuff that belonged to my mother, who died three years earlier. She made amazing needlework, but stopped about the time that cable TV came around. I was surprised that she kept those things. She was not a keeper. But, I am. Every Sunday in Rome, I looked for treasures in Porta Portese, Rome's sprawling outdoor flea market. Everything dissolved into one story, into the substance of things, their pasts, promises, and concealed truths."

- Leslie Hirst

Breaking the barrier between vision and reality, the artifacts in THESE THINGS lie behind veils or shadows, trapped in the plane of their image. It's a taxonomy of items preserved as passing time, affixed to a specific place but not to a single moment. The voids, gaps and slippage between repeated forms invite connections and individual stories about what we see and how we remember.

The sky is a creative and physical collaborator in the archive. It first appears as a character in the artwork through a portal, causing it to resemble a celestial body. However, the image was taken from inside the Ardeatine Caves outside of Rome. To stand at the spot where the Fosse Ardeatine massacre took place on 24 March 1944, where a mass killing of 335 Roman civilians and political prisoners were shot at point-blank range by German occupation troops, stirs emotions outside of language.

The sequence of items in THESE THINGS includes a series of redacted dictionary pages from the American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company, Boston. Copyright ©). The proliferation of images in the dictionary include low-quality photographic reproductions, which, when placed alongside the collection of other non-verbal objects in the book, suggest a type of alternate fact. They reinforce that nothing is as it appears.

Working with the sky—or rather, the sun—provides a temporal stasis for suspending the life of objects. Beginning with the unique cyanotype frontispieces, where the footprint of an object is preserved directly into fabric with the sun's rays, and continuing throughout the pages with original cyanotypes on silk and reproductions of original cyanotypes on paper, the thingness and identity of objects and memory are called into question.

Among the things in THESE THINGS is a poem by Joanna Klink from her selection of poems entitled NIGHT SKY. The lines of the poem interrupt and then replace the images with words that conjure more vivid object-associations than the visual items presented. The closing line of the poem offers reflection to the objects — real and reproduced — contained in the book: "Things you cannot say."