Limited edition of 25, 150 pages, blind embossed raw bookboard covers with exposed Smyth sewn binding
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I want to tell you about how the land transformed me. About how she, the desert mother, although intense, rugged, and vast, was tender with me. How she grieved with, healed with, wandered with me, unfurled me on the current of her breath into deeper time, into a primordial home my wandering diasporic heart had been longing for for a long, long time.
I became an animal again, remembering how to rise and fall with the sun. I practiced reverence by listening, until I learned to hear the most delicate intonations of her thickest silence—the soft bristling of a creosote in the wind; that ancient immanent tongue that the stones speak, reverberating through my sternum and into the eternal emptiness. I met elders in the form of dead pine trees, frozen and fossilized in perfect, fractal radiance. They taught me how to grow bare and luminous, to wrap soft flesh tenderly around the hard edges of this world.
Here, I practiced my widest surrender, my body splayed open on the grit of boulders, my belly turning as I descended into the cracks and seams, the marrow and magma of a more feral intelligence. You see, to converse with beings who are a millennia or a million years old, we are called to expand. Like our elders, we remember that we too are porous, corrosive—bodies storied with time, alchemically made and unmade with the world. That whatever fortresses we have built long to be unmade, to remember what it is to yield.
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Field Notes in the Vortex is a devotional work, made with the deepest love and gratitude for the lands of the Southern California high desert, the unceded ancestral homelands of the Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Mojave peoples. I honor the wisdom and stewardship of the first peoples who have been in sacred relationship with the land since time immemorial. I am humbled to meet the land as diasporic kin, seeking to weave into reciprocal and reverential relation, with deep and loving listening as my guiding practice.
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Since 2023, this project has been researched and developed across residencies at Jackrabbit Studios, High Desert Test Sites / A-Z West, and Kala Art Institute. This first edition was designed by Lucy Mu Li, printed by For the Birds Trapped in Airports, and bound by Sorella Studios on Tongva land in Los Angeles, California, and produced with generous support from the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship.
