The instructions for Twenty Ways to Know Me begin with the words, "My life has been a game of hide and seek. The game asked me to hide myself away..." Indeed, when I began working on the project, it was the most vulnerable work of art I had ever made. It was an act of stepping outside my comfort zone and allowing myself to tell my own stories. And yet these stories remained well hidden, requiring participation from others—and, in some cases, as many as six people—to unlock them.

The stories range from the profound, such as my ongoing discovery of my gender identity, to the everyday and equally meaningful: a meditation on the loft bed in my room, or a lovely thought pulled from one of my journals. The collages ask participants to use their own smartphones in unusual ways, devices that might at any moment buzz with a private message or notification. Smartphones so often foster disconnection and isolation; here, they become tools for participation, coordination, and self-discovery.

I would love to make more smartphone collages, more self-portrait puzzles to assemble, more stories to discover, and there could be something powerful in allowing this project to unfold over a lifetime—to return to it every five years, or every decade, creating countless new “ways to know me” as I change and grow. But at the very least, this project scratched a serious itch at the time: the desire "to be myself, to be honest, to be seen, to be found, to be loved."

Working in music has taught me a great deal about how to welcome the creative flow— to say yes to the ideas that are already here rather than always searching for something more perfect, ideal, or predetermined. There are many ways I write songs, but most begin in an open-ended space of experimentation: sitting at the keyboard, riffing on the clarinet, following an idea without knowing where it might lead. For my sung songs, however, the process often begins even further from the intention to create. A melody will simply arrive—a phrase I am humming or singing, often in a moment when I am feeling something deeply, whether struck by the beauty of the world or feeling worn down by its struggles.

Sometimes the melody arrives with an inkling of words. I try to follow the feeling quickly, shaping the lyrics in a way that feels true to my mental space, my life, and the world around me. I make a lo-fi phone recording, preserving the song in the moment of its arrival. These recordings become small containers for possibility—some remain fragments, while others wait to be returned to, developed, and eventually become songs.

I discovered Loren Eiseley’s books shortly after being invited to create an art book for "Library Group Show" at Tappeto Volante and while I was first working on my research. I knew that I wanted to find a book about human evolution, but what I found in Eiseley’s writing was much more expansive. His work pushed my research beyond the history of early art and technology and toward much larger questions: Who are we? What is this innate impulse we have toward creation?

Eiseley’s prose immediately struck me. It is factual and deeply poetic, imaginative and at times almost speculative. In The Immense Journey, he invites us to consider evolution not simply as a progression through our mammalian ancestors, but as an accumulation of all the things we once were. There is a deep spirituality in this way of thinking that resonated with me, a sense that our history is not something behind us but something that remains within us.

My connection to Eiseley’s writing led me to invest a great deal of love and energy into the book I was creating. I filled its interior pages with collages and recorded myself reading my favorite passages aloud, embedding QR codes to the audio throughout the book as an invitation for viewers to sponge up and savor Eiseley’s words as I had, in hopes that they might enter more deeply into the world he created within its pages.