I have a deep love for traditional practice, but I don’t consider myself a calligrapher: My service to the art is different. I’m in search of what Anaïs Nin calls counterpoisons—a devoted refusal to despair. Which I can only call “love letters”. Love letters first transform the one who writes them. Love letters require risks in significance & disclosure— a sense of self that allows (if not seeks out) its own remaking. These “letters” place honesty over certainty, cultivating a necessary courage to wait in illegible, ambiguous, if not counterintuitive places.

Love letters also connote disciplined aspects of calligraphy, literature, & also legacies we inherit, pass on, & can potentially re-write. In many parts of the world, calligraphy is the highest art. In the Arabic I studied, disciplined surrender replaces self-expression. Study is rooted in sacred traditions; tended by generations. This feels pronounced to me here, in a country hedged by isolation, self-expression, & appropriation— one that takes individual freedom as anthem while simultaneously, as Audre Lorde reminds us, being on the wrong side of every liberation movement.

If there’s a calligraphy unique to North America, it’s multilingual, held up by many hands. Our ligatures —the joins between forms—are a fractured, often illegible confluence of intersecting languages, global ruptures, & profound legacies of international solidarity. Too many letters remain unanswered & unrequited, or worse—increasingly rendered as if they don’t exist at all.

I incorporate ink made from recycled guns in my works to remind me where I live—if not in script, then in ubiquitous underpainting. This is part of what I mean when I say “American Ink”, but I’m also referring to that beautiful ricochet of languages & voices— past, present, & folded into the soil here, imbedded in each encounter. My pallet is subtle, metallic, iridescent—works are impossible to view from a single vantage point or linguistic sensibility. I want to know how to write a love letter in American Ink— without concealing her legacies or my own. Much of what gets remade in my works is English.