The Spiral of Becoming

I wanted to make visible something I have never been able to say out loud: that I am not one age at a time, that every version of myself I have ever been is still here, folded quietly into the one I am now. I did not want to show memory as something we look back on, separate from us, kept at a safe distance. I wanted to show it as something we are still made of, still carrying, the way a body carries its own beginning long after it has stopped looking like one.

There is no grief in this for me, and no longing to go back; I am not mourning who I used to be, I am simply admitting that he never really left. When I curled this shape in on itself, I was trying to picture what it might feel like if growing older were not a departure but a kind of embrace, if the child and the adult were never in competition for the same space but were always quietly holding each other from the inside.

I hope that whoever encounters this work feels, even briefly, that strange tenderness: the sense that we are never as far from our own beginning as time convinces us we are.