ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER, 2025
A pivot point in my creative practice and the first time my writing grew into something else. A living record of the power of time and increments. Proof to myself that life, poetry, art—it is all made line by line.
"I tried to make it big but this town painted me so red I left and when I came back I noticed all my colours had changed."
The Statement
The world moves fast, but I'm at the speed of one step forward, two steps back. Progress, or "progress", then a cul de sac. I kept trying. This can't be it. So my latest, smallest project started on March 3, 2025: 100 pocket poems, 100 days, each one based on a two-colour gradient. Something familiar, something simple.
Soon, I wanted to give up, thinking: this isn't big or important enough. No one is looking. Some of this is ugly and stupid and I am just repeating myself. (Flowers, stars, sky, mint.)
But the longer I stayed with it, I realized: this was the thing. Is. Life is sometimes ugly and stupid and we are just repeating ourselves.
"ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER" is a compression of the journey, using line and colour to visualize and encode all 100 poems. 100 gradients representing the ongoing persistence of motion. Each day, almost nothing. Frustratingly nothing. But together, something. Everything.
Change is happening all around you, all the time. Most of it is imperceptible. But when you're on the other side, you'll see—or feel—that you are not the same. Life unfolded, you changed, we all get there line by line.
Select Poems (March 3—July 22, 2025)
The Painting
Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
Look close enough and long enough, and change reveals itself. This painting encodes all 100 gradients from my 2025 100 day project, the first time I ever finished the challenge started by Yale design professor Michael Bierut in 2006. The process itself involved painstaking colour matching for 200 colours, painted into thin vertical stripes. Painting this, getting lost in the vigorous strokes of blending, continuing despite the lack of visible progress, it became a record of perseverance. A pivot point in my creative practice, the summer I changed my relationship to art and time. Is this what they call trusting the process?
The Catalog
"ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER" POEM CATALOG
A collectible culmination of my 100 day project. Includes 70 select poems from the project, plus new short essays* featuring four different ways of looking at gradients, written exclusively for the catalog. Designed to be disassembled into newsprint posters.
*Essays include:
Design
Sky
Physics
Self
24 pages / 6 sheets printed on 11 x 14 in. tabloid sized newsprint. Published August 2025.
"There is something inside you humming in a colour too loud to ignore. Ideas to hatch and places to go. An endless buzz inside your mind, manifested into a vision board or many full of wants, wants, more wants. But the reality of the situation is that you were moving at a turtle’s pace and then made to feel okay about it. You thought this was it, this is you, and that’s fine. You've made it in the surviving-with-benefits sense. Then you were softened, shaken, astounded, and broken. You hitched ride after ride, carried one by one to the next stop not by a tech bro or guru, but by artists. One day, the train stopped and you peeled back the petals. Your name was on it, waiting for you to get on and steer, drive, fly, whatever you need to keep moving, because there is still something inside you humming, and now you know what it is. You asked for something to change, for some kind of momentum, a sign? You got it baby, now go."