This body of work emerged as a self-help exercise during the pandemic. I made compositions with layered and abstracted text to meditate upon ideas during a time I felt very stuck. Painting in the borders between letters helped me to think about what could be controlled in my body, my home, my community. The process and motif of the text based works emerged from my investigation of three art forms that traveled and evolved with the Jewish diaspora- cartography, paper cutting, and micrography (using micro-text and forms of calligraphy to create images).

Calligraphic writing was developed by Islamic and Jewish artists in the 9th century onward to skirt restrictions on representation and express concepts visually and abstractly through figuration. Beyond rules and boundaries humans have consistently found a way to deeply express and connect.