I join the visitors at the gates
2023-Present
I Join the Visitors at the Gates emerged from my grief in response to the genocide in Gaza and the struggle to remain present to suffering on an incomprehensible scale. Drawing on the Forty Rules of Love attributed to Shams al-Tabrizi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, I created forty small coffins, intending to accompany each with an artifact and a filmed ritual. Seven of these rituals were realized. Through gathering, cutting, folding, and enclosing materials, making became a practice of mourning and devotion.
The project takes its title from a poem I wrote years earlier, reflecting on my relationship with Palestine—a place of profound belonging and intimacy, but also persistent uncertainty and the anticipation of unbearable loss. The poem speaks to the coexistence of beauty and devastation, and to the ways we carry places within us.
Moving between poetry, ritual, photography, and assemblage, the work explores how acts of attention and care can give physical form to grief, honor lives lost, and sustain our capacity for love in the face of violence.
I join the visitors at the gates
This place owns my hands, my legs, my eyes.
The space behind my ribs that contains a universe of contradictions.
Light and dark on the flip side of every moment.
Hope and fear.
Connection, and the threat of losses greater than I can bear.
I join the visitors at the gates,
filled with longing to weave myself into the fabric of this life.
Wooed by words of welcome and instant intimacies,
readily given passage into hearts and homes.
I come and I go,
carrying flesh and bone across wall and sea.
Far away, freedom lights the night sky.
I squint into the future while holding too tightly to the past.
There is too much history here, we say.
We celebrate, and we mourn,
and time passes, blurring the edges of our memories.
Carpets of wildflowers
and the brilliant blue sky of early spring
reveal the ignorance of nature.
It blooms and shines,
waving in the wind, even as the world caves slowly in.