Ritual of Giving, In My Garden – the DNA of Memory, Lint
Ritual, Presence, and the Intelligence of the Everyday
My performance work emerges from the same philosophical ground as my visual practice: the belief that lived experience itself is a form of intelligence, and that meaning arises through attention, care, and relation rather than spectacle or display. Performance, for me, is not a departure from making objects or images. It is another way of working with material, time, and presence, often using the body, daily actions, and shared encounters as the medium.
I understand performance as ritual rather than event. It is grounded in repetition, gesture, offering, and the slow accumulation of meaning over time. These works often unfold quietly, sometimes privately, sometimes in the presence of others, and sometimes without an audience at all. They resist the idea of performance as theatrical demonstration. Instead, they function as lived structures, moments where art and life deliberately overlap.
Many of my performance projects began as everyday practices: cooking, gardening, giving, observing, tending, collecting, remembering. Over time, these practices revealed themselves as artworks, not because they were staged, but because they were sustained with intention. The boundary between art and life is not erased in these works; it is made porous.
A central thread across my performance practice is Ritual of Giving, an ongoing project that began in 2002 and continues to this day. What started as making and sharing food gradually expanded into the creation and gifting of artworks—drawings, portraits, objects—offered to individuals who have been part of my life in meaningful ways. Giving, in this context, is not symbolic. It is an action that generates relation, memory, and responsibility. The artwork does not end when it leaves my hands; it continues in the life of the person who receives it.
Another foundational performance field is In My Garden – The DNA of Memory, a lifelong project rooted in my practice of gardening and seed saving, begun in 1988. In this work, plants, seeds, seasons, and care function as carriers of memory across time. Gardening becomes both a literal and philosophical performance: a way of understanding regeneration, loss, inheritance, and continuity. Seeds are treated as archives—biological vessels that hold experience, place, and time within them.
The Lint Project
The Lint Project is one of my most minimal and most intimate performance works. It is rooted in the accumulation of residue—lint collected from clothing, domestic spaces, and daily life, and in the sustained attention given to what is usually discarded, ignored, or erased.
Lint is a byproduct of living. It is composed of fibers shed through wear, movement, friction, and time. It carries the physical trace of bodies, environments, labor, and proximity. In this project, lint is not treated as waste. It is treated as evidence.
The performance consists of collecting, saving, and holding lint over long periods of time. The act is repetitive, quiet, and intentionally unremarkable. There is no spectacle. The meaning arises through duration and care. What would normally be thrown away is instead acknowledged, preserved, and regarded as material memory.
The Lint Project operates as a meditation on impermanence, intimacy, and attention. It asks what remains after experience passes, and who decides what is worth keeping. Like my other performance works, it blurs the boundary between art and life. The project exists not as a single event, but as an ongoing ritual embedded within everyday routines.
This work is also deeply connected to my belief that the hand is the mind. The repetitive act of collecting lint becomes a form of thinking through touch. The residue of living becomes a record of presence. Meaning is not imposed; it accumulates.
Within my broader practice, The Lint Project sits alongside Ritual of Giving and In My Garden – The DNA of Memory as part of a constellation of performance rituals that honor what is small, overlooked, and slow. It affirms that even the most fragile materials—those we are conditioned to dismiss—carry intelligence, memory, and consequence.
Across these and other performance works, the body is present but not centered as spectacle. It functions instead as a site of attention, labor, listening, and response. Performance becomes a way to slow down perception, to honor the intelligence of materials, and to create conditions for connection rather than consumption.
I view these works as part of a broader ecology within my practice. They sit alongside painting, drawing, installation, artist books, and text-based work, not as separate categories but as interconnected modes of inquiry. Performance allows ideas explored visually—emergence, interconnection, memory, care, and distributed intelligence, to be lived, enacted, and shared in real time.
Ultimately, my performance practice is grounded in a simple conviction:
that the actual experience is the work of art.
Ritual of Giving Images
In My Garden – the DNA of Memory
