figure/future of the wild/child assembling itself with parts of you
2025
Drypoint etching on pink rock salt
8 x 12 x 2 inches
Supported by the digital residency at @thenicholsonproject
I was thinking a lot about the constitution of the mother, both as a form of perseverance and and in the literal sense of her composition. Pregnancy is not thought of as a great philosophical condition as much as a bodily one but it is one of the most radical challenges to the autonomy of the self. It creates a profound oneness with an Other, but this collapse of all distance is as deeply uncomfortable as it is intimate. The child takes so much from the mother that it is ultimately a reconstitution of her into a separate being. And this connection doesn’t stop there. A birthing person can carry cells from their child for the rest of their lives.
I imagine a similar, chimeric process: autonomous organs, human and non, each with their own will, scuttling together to assemble new constitutions from the protean mass of gestating m-Other. The text is strategically half-hidden, so it can be read in multiple ways: “the figure of the child assembling itself from parts of you” or “the future of the wild assembling itself from parts of you.” This slippage reflects how deeply our personal legacies are tangled with the future of the natural world. For me, this is about trusting the body’s knowledge, even as we acknowledge its instability, its porous borders with the non-human, and its constant state of becoming. It’s a reminder that we are always, in some way, assembled from many others.
ID: Etched salt slab with black line drawings of a root-like body and tooth forms layered over hand-lettered text—“future/figure of the child/wild assembling itself with parts of you”—on warm pink-orange stone.
