Love Dots, 2024

Ink on paper

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I drew these lines from photographs of us. Not the photographs themselves, but the bodies in them – or my memory of looking at those bodies. I followed the contours with my hand, trying to stay close to the place where one body ends and the other begins. The line looks certain. The body isn't.
A contour can say: here is the edge. Here is where you stop. Here is where I begin. But the longer I look at it, the less convincing that certainty becomes.
What exactly am I tracing? A body? An image of a body? A memory? The distance between two people who already know each other too well to believe that a line can settle anything?
The photograph freezes us. The drawing does something stranger. The body becomes a trace. The line follows it without becoming it. It gets close. Then it stops. I notice that I want to call that tenderness. Perhaps it is. The line remains. I keep looking.