A body of writing and visual work centered on individual words and the uneven and unseen weight they carry in lived experience.
Status: Ongoing
What this project is
Heavy Things is a serialized collection of works, each focused on a single, familiar word.
These are words that may appear ordinary or neutral, yet still shape credibility, belonging, and consequence through everyday use. Their weight often comes from familiarity. They are applied casually, often with authority, and they land differently across people and situations.
The project examines how common terms accumulate meaning through repetition, context, and positionality. Some words function as description, others as judgment, shorthand, category, or verdict. Heavy Things treats them as sites of sustained attention.
How the work is built
This project is built one word at a time.
Each work develops in response to the word itself, within a structured visual system. In the painting-based works, letters are separated across a three-row grid that interrupts the act of reading and slows interpretation. Repeated color outlines build density around each letter while maintaining legibility. Structural black lines press across the image, reinforcing a sense of constraint, pressure, or imposed order. Black star forms may also appear throughout the work as adornment, puncture, repair, or anchoring.
Repetition is central to the project. By returning to related structures across many works, shifts in color, spacing, scale, and surface can alter the emotional tone and pressure of a word. Some works resolve more fully than others. Some remain open.
Most works in the series have so far been developed at 16 × 20 inches, though the project continues to expand in form, scale, and material presence over time.
There is no required order, and completion of the full set is not treated as a deadline.
The word set
This project works from a fixed set of 114 words. The list defines the scope of the work and sets its internal constraints. Repetition and omission are part of how the project thinks.
The list includes:
- words selected for their everyday authority
- words that intentionally overlap or echo one another
- words whose absence is deliberate
The numbering is arbitrary. Works may emerge in any order and may change position over time.
View the full list of 114 words here.
This project is in progress.
More material will be added here over time.