I’ve been disassembling, palleating, honoring and dipping myself into chairs that appear to have been built by hand in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and repaired and reupholstered multiple times since. I’m fascinated by the makers, trained and perhaps part of a multi-generational skilled lineage, who fed their families by building places for people to sit. Crafted slowly, repaired and re-dressed for different times and demands–a tending to the thing that breaks, a reimagining of the thing for a new purpose.

I’ve fallen so deeply in love with their knots and splinters. Each has become a body to me, to remember, to care for, to lay with. Armatures are built to hold the body, to allow for rest and contemplation and an object for the eye to behold. But a chair without a body is a mark of absence. A permanently empty chair loses all function. A chair that you are never allowed to sit on is already a site of grief.

I look to the organic shapes my grandpa crafted with the lathe from driftwood. The rocking chair my mom sat in to take late night phone calls—I would curl up in her lap and press my head against her chest, hear the vibrations in her ribs, muffled and loud. I continue to be intrigued by these armatures built to soothe, to rock a baby to sleep, to support a worn out mother, to push a breeze on the face in the middle of summer. How do these shapes comfort us when they are inverted? How can we give these armatures some agency? Allow them autonomy?

I have always been guided by Judaism’s embrace of Questioning as a holy pursuit. I come from a long line of grandfathers who inscribed sacred texts written over millennia. These arguing Talmudic rabbis investigated theoretical possibilities and gray areas that exist in our conception of life. My art practice means wading and working through the complexity that characterizes this world and the people I love. My impression in the spaces I’ve created feels more like an apparition than a protagonist, an attempt to move like the ghosts I know. Do ghosts sit? How do we trace impressions of air and build altars of comfort to spirits? What kind of work is required to build a space that contains loss?