Against Explanation

Some works I have made have been circling the same concerns for years—decades now. I don’t always recognize this while I’m making them. It becomes clearer only in retrospect, when different works begin to echo one another in ways that feel less like choice and more like return.

Family life, parenthood, housework, the maintenance of a home. Time as something measured and something felt. Regret as a kind of delayed clarity. Being outdoors, moving through space—skateboarding (sadly no more), cycling, my body negotiating balance and speed. Domestic materials: plywood, house paint, construction systems that turn complexity into forms and surfaces that appear simple. Architecture, renovation, trade labor. Relationships. Beauty that arrives not as decoration but as residue of effort.

These are not themes I selected so much as conditions that continue to reappear. They are forms of attention that seem to return regardless of intention.

The more I work, the less convincing it feels to say that a piece is “about” something in advance. It slows me down. Intention explains almost nothing. It describes a moment before the work exists, not what the work becomes. Often, I only recognize what a work is about after it has already taken shape—sometimes long after.

This is why the question “tell me about the work” never feels easy. It assumes that the work is already available for description, as if its meaning could be cleanly separated from its making. But description is already interpretation. The moment I choose what to point out, I am already deciding what matters.

And yet “what is the work about?” is not a simpler question either. It suggests that meaning exists somewhere behind the work, waiting to be stated. I am not sure that is true.

What seems closer to my experience is that a work is not a message or an object with fixed content. It is a trace of attention—something formed through repetition, constraint, and return. The same questions come back in different materials, different situations, different forms.

Some things I thought I had resolved return anyway. The distinction between description and meaning starts to feel less important than the fact that both are attempts to stabilize something that is still moving. A work does not settle into explanation. It continues to exceed it. The most honest answer is often the simplest: I am still figuring it out.