Every Word That Starts with F moves through our mind. It is about memory – both the tangible mechanics and hardware inside our brains, and the ethereal intangible of memories. It is about plasticity, and what happens when both tangible and intangible are constructed, de-constructed, re-constructed. Ultimately, it is about the construction and re-construction of self.
Shadow-images of blown glass neurons are captured, frozen in time to the surface of skin-like mulberry paper. They leave a print, a trace, a record. Thread-lines, marking time, cross and cross again, illustrating and accumulating our lived everyday. These traces leave behind the accrual of experience (memory, learning, knowledge) while simultaneously collecting their marks and scars. Do they pin things down for later examination and retrieval? Repair a rip in consciousness? Create a clog and a sticky confusion? We become who we are, and that becoming is fluid, mutable.
Behind the scenes, a collection of glass neurons congregate. Both our memory-makers and our memories materialize. Do they await our examination, our recall, our validation, our repair? A list of words that start with “F,” remembered and recited again and again within the space of one minute (a standard screening used to assess cognitive health) becomes a mantra, a meditation, a prayer.
Our brains are plastic and constantly changing. We add to them as we experience and as we grow; we drill, we learn. We celebrate new skills, new information, new people. As we age, these layers and experiences compile, layer by layer, shadow over shadow, a complicated thread line. Is this – the collection of memory and experience – the sum total of who we are? And then, what does it mean when we begin to forget?
Every Word That Starts with F bears witness to that question. Through its physical accumulation and presence, its amassed and sometimes jumbled layers, it examines the place where memory and personhood intersect. It is fragile and ethereal, but also resilient and strong. Thread over paper over thread over paper may become confusing, but it is still intact. And where paper and thread may fade and degrade with time, glass will exist for millennia.
This work asks us to consider related corollaries: that where a human mind transforms over time, collected shadows and layers; personhood and self, remain. And where a human mind and body do not last forever, where they have touched others will leave a trace that is carried forward. Within these reflections, I find an aching sadness, and I find beauty and I find hope.