FIRST WORDS: A Primer | Expandable Pocket Gallery Guide
First Words is a pocket glossary of the recurring personal iconography that threads through my practice — a visual vocabulary built across bodies of work and deepened through repeated encounters. Glasses, Gathering Rod, Tower, Tether, Baby, Heart, Lightning — each symbol carries layered meaning, functioning as visual shorthand for complex ideas about energy, transformation, connection, and the thresholds between worlds.
This guide is a tool, not a prescription. It empowers viewers to decode the work on their own terms, to become co-researchers constructing their own narrative pathways through each exhibition. The visual syntax is familiar. The Primer gifts fluency through the lexicon. It makes the unfamiliar navigable and the esoteric accessible.
First Words is a living document — a real time mirror that reflects my deepening physical, spiritual, and artistic understanding. Whether digitally online, as a published pocket guidebook, or as an exhibition zine, First Words arrives like a welcome basket — resources and context at an open door, wherever you stand.
It is the head to the heart. The body to the soul.
BABY State of fully-formed perfection. Calm before the storm. The one to beat
CRYSTAL Defining the intellectual limit, bait for the explorer. A scientist's stubborn denial-cum-transcendent breakthrough.
GATHERING ROD Energy receptor and channeller. C>A+B where A=B. The user grounds the circuit. Balance is essential.
GLASSES A gift of clarity, an understanding without judgement. The moment of synthesis that brings the unimaginable into focus.
LADDER Marking the passage of time. No top and bottom, just before and after. A one-way street; you can never go back.
PULLEY A mystery of give and take. Light work for the faithful.
TETHER Guy wire for ambitious form. Inadvertent spiritual grounding is the physicist's flex.
TOWER An artificial construction, an alarm clock destined to run down. Balance and unity are the winding key.
WEIGHT Reminder of valiant effort and irrefutable proof of mortality. Trusty foil to ascension.