Fragments of thoughts

I often ask myself where these thoughts come from. Do they come from me, or maybe the Universe? Do they have paths I am supposed to follow? If they do, I unfortunately have wandered further into the thicket.

Sometimes a fragment arrives fully formed. Brutalism x Rococo? The question catches me and won't let go. I would love to see a vessel with these roots—something that holds both the raw violence of brutalism and the ornate excess of rococo at once. How would those two worlds live together? What would that tension create?

Other times it's a statement that refuses to settle: I am who I will be (Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday). Time collapses. Identity becomes plural. I am not just becoming—I am already everything I will be, all at once.

Then there are the fragments that feel urgent, almost angry: Curiosity Killed the Internet (an ardent manifestation in the works). A thought about how curiosity has metastasized online, how it devours us. This one is still unfolding, still demanding to be made.

I take these thoughts and store them in my cheeks like acorns. I let them warm in there, get soft and malleable, until I can spit them out into a new form—one that somehow is perfectly shaped to fit my most recent endeavor. That is how I name my pieces, how I come up with projects, and how I create my stories. A sliver of an idea, a half-formed thought that catches me in the moment. Sometimes I write it down and forget about it. Other times it sticks to my skin like honey. Either way, I always come back to it. Maybe it's hours later, or days, weeks, months, or years. Whenever the time is right, a name (a story, a project) is born from a fragment of an idea.

 

I look at my lists of fragments and feel a heavy combination of anxiety and excitement for what they will become. I don't yet have two-legged children, but I assume it's the same way parents look at their infants (don't grow up (please grow up)). There have been many times when I believed a fragment to be perfect, only to see it shake and shiver and molt and emerge something completely new in the finale. The reveal comes, once again, with a heavy combination of anxiety and excitement: anxiety that things change so quickly, and excitement at how quickly things change.

 

Text: Aly Louis

Art: Aly Louis