I don’t think about where the images are coming from, or what they “mean” I just let them come In.

I DIDN’T KNOW AT FIRST IF THEY WERE BUBBLES OR BONNETS OR NETS, IF THEY WERE METAL CAGES. WERE THEY FOR PROTECTION? IF SO, WHOSE?

FOR MONTHS EVERY TIME I SAT DOWN TO WORK I’D THINK, THIS TIME I’M NOT GOING TO COVER THEIR FACES, AND THEN THIS IS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

I have always been a maker. Making things, chiefly writing things, is really all I have ever done. It is how I live in the world. It’s how I am conversation with myself. It is how I make sense of my experience.

When I was growing both my parents worked. My father was a chemist and my mother was a caterer. They also made art. My father welded and my mother painted. My father made large metal sculptures, my mother created still lives in oils. Neither would have called themselves artists. Making art was just something that you did. You wouldn’t call it a “hobby” it just a way of living in the world.

Making was rewarded. My sister and I were allowed to watch television if we were “doing something with your hands”. There was no sitting like a lump in front of the idiot box. In our family laziness is a sin, barely surpassed by murder. The deal was you could watch television as long as you were “doing something with your hands”. Like dusting or vacumming the family room—or drawing, embroidering, knitting, making pot holders, sewing, making pinch pots out of clay, learning origami…

Even now I find it very difficult to watch television without doing something creative with my hands. More than once I have dropped a ball of yarn knitting in the dark in the movie theater.

It’s all narrative.

It’s all of a piece.