I put signs up around the Bay Area primarily in places I considered interstitial or programmatically empty: bus stops, parking garage elevators, my apartment trash room, a bank of mailboxes, the side of a parking meter. The below poems, explorations, and monotypes contain words harvested from the text of strangers.

I continued to receive texts for several months and accumulated over 300 words in 10 languages. No one ever provided their names, although some offered explanations of their choices. There is no way to know where each person encountered my call, or how each word appeared for them. I rearranged them to create small poems: free verse, mesostic, haiku and concrete, but I felt they needed something more physical that acknowledged the process.

The final monotypes serve as as location-less excavations; tablets unearthed from a collective mind, waiting to be rearranged and reinterpreted, and in conversation with the cellular format of the spreadsheet populated by the words. This process created a sort of inverse dérive, where the unplanned journey is not taken by the artist, but the final work of art. Each word carries the illegible data of time and place. As in poetry, the space between each is as important as its meaning. This physical origin, however, is only known to me as a network of hubs, unmappaple to each point. The circuitous journey of each word to paper— flyer, text, spreadsheet, stencil, plate, paper—mirrors the distance from letterform to referent. I am interested in this push and pull of meanings and locations, particularly as related to the idea of “non-place” and the function of instructions in our everyday lives.