This body is a record. This body is recording.

For seven years, I’ve carried the same type of notebook every day—off-white covers and off-white pages. They’ve captured not just the thoughts I’ve written in them, but the world I’ve written around them—each cover is uniquely marked with stray pencil marks from transit in the bottom of my bag, grass stains, beet juice, scratches, mud, ink, blood, and eyeliner.

As I’ve started work on my second book—Colluvium—which explores themes of time, trauma, and embodiment, I began to realize that these notebooks formed a body all their own, and a story of the world I’ve passed through. The covers themselves are a record of me—they bear my world visibly.

This body is a record. This body is recording. is a visual installation of photographs of these notebooks, each titled with a single line of text that appears within its pages. The first installation of this work appeared at Seattle’s Volunteer Park water tower on November 10, 2019, and was generously supported with funding from Artist Trust.