What we allow, 2026
Cloth, thread, folding.
This work began while I was reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I had been thinking about spaces, but gradually the question became more intimate: the way we move between being open to the world and withdrawing from it.
I began with pale cloth and thread. I folded the cloth, stitched it, opened it, folded it back again. With each movement something was exposed and something else was protected.
I started to think of this movement as a kind of rhythm. We can be fully present to the world for a moment, and retreat into ourselves the next. We open, close, reveal, conceal. Neither position is permanent.
The work does not have a fixed form. It can be opened and folded again, and each configuration changes the relationship between inside and outside.
Calvino’s book was not something I wanted to illustrate. It was simply where the work began — with the thought that the spaces we inhabit are not only around us. Some of them are carried within.
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Some time before making this piece, I wrote about the need to return to small things: to the hands, to materials, to words that ask for attention rather than scale.
The essay was not written for this work, but when I look at them together now, I recognise something of the same movement in both.