Before the naming/after the labelling

Supported by the Access Arts SAFE grant, this new work-in-progress is a hybrid text that brings together new and old pieces spanning twenty-seven years across drawing, painting, photography, and writing. It is structured as a two-sided flip book with two separate titles, Before the Naming and After the Labelling. The poetry in Before the Naming is spare and restrained, holding states of longing, concealment, and becoming in language that refuses spectacle, resolution, or fixed identity, allowing the self to remain tentative, searching, and unfinished. In After the Labelling, prose and image speak from within what has already been named, tracing a body that is no longer searching for language, but struggling to survive the meanings imposed upon it.