The Weight of What Remains: Destruction, Memory, and the Art of Letting Go

My work in artists' book works and box assemblages is often driven by an interest in what is left behind. This is not nostalgia, though nostalgia is always a risk. It is something else: a practice of re-working elements left behind through change as a means to remind and remember, to examine the weight of inheritance and accumulation, to understand how objects carry the traces of lives lived.

The books, boxes and collages created as part of the series Lovely and Amazing incorporated elements from an inheritance—decades spent working with the Wheeler archive after my great-aunt Ruth died.

Another series of box works, Two Plus, incorporated elements accumulated through years of relationship with others. I welcomed a turning away from books, with the requisite attention to engineering towards box works that stayed put, arrangements that sacrificed interactivity for the possibility of a different kind of depth.

In January of 2023, I destroyed many of the individual works from the Two Plus series.

The pieces I dismantled had been constructed with such attention to permanence that their destruction required force—several could only be taken apart by bashing them with a hammer. A process both satisfying and unsettling. Here was work I had built to last, work into which I had poured the painstaking process of thoughtfully selecting, arranging, and fixing in place objects in order to achieve balance and accord. The task of creating connections between objects and examining the relationships between them is time-consuming, requiring attention to a disparate array of colors, shapes, and associations created by these juxtapositions. I had solved and re-solved assembly problems, redesigning structural strategies multiple times until every element was securely held. And here I was, undoing it with blunt force.

It's striking how well-built these Two Plus pieces were. As I worked to dismantle them, I remembered the care invested in their construction, the assumption of permanence embedded in every structural decision. The boxes had been designed to contain and protect, to create clean, uncluttered spaces where objects could be in conversation with one another without the threat of shifting or collapse. I had worked to include only elements of relevance or significance, resisting my tendency to solve problems by adding more, opting instead to reposition or even remove elements. Taking them apart meant confronting all of this care, this discipline.

The reasons for destruction seemed sound at the time. Golden (pictured above) needed repair, and I wasn't keen about spending time on repairs, particularly for work that seemed of so little interest to others. There's a calculus that happens in the studio, a weighing of time and energy against purpose and audience. When a piece requires repair, it forces the question: is this worth saving? Implicit in that question is another: worth saving for whom? The honest answer, that much of this work was made for an audience that never quite materialized, made the decision easier, but difficult nonetheless.

This raises difficult questions about why we make what we make. The Two Plus series had been an attempt to expand my ingredient list after years spent with the Wheeler archive, to create connections between objects drawn from multiple sources rather than a single inheritance. My task had been to examine relationships between objects, working from the premise that an object is anything we can talk or think about—including intangibles such as emotions, beliefs, fears. More than one of any object creates a minimum of one relationship or connection; the more objects, the more connections. I was examining how objects relate both to their properties and to their connections with other objects, working specifically with things that related to characteristics embodied by particular individuals, or to times and places in my history governed in part by specific characteristics.

The series as a whole had developed into an examination of personalities mostly real but some imagined. Each box a kind of portrait, though not in any conventional sense. The objects selected had either direct links or strong associative links to particular characteristics. The work involved preservation, collection, identity, the integration of buried stories—and when successful, avoided nostalgia.

But for whom had I been building these portraits? To continue asking that question was both stifling and induced anxiety. For me, physical action reduces anxiety, and the need to manage anxiety often rules the day.

Some elements I wanted to keep. From Patient, I extracted what I could before pitching the rest, but the two mercury thermometers are gone now. Today I'll root around and find the others scattered through remaining pieces—I don't really need the presence of mercury in fragile glass tubes in my life.

There's something fitting about the thermometers, though, something that captures what these assemblages were trying to do. A thermometer is an instrument of precision, designed to measure the invisible, to give objective form to a subjective experience. You can't see fever, but mercury rises in response to it, climbing the calibrated tube in thin silvery increments. The thermometers in Patient spoke to illness, vulnerability, the body's deviations from normal—to the experience of being unwell and the tools we use to quantify that unwellness, to track the journey back toward health.

Mercury is toxic, beautiful and dangerous and requires careful handling. The tubes are fragile. What seems like a reliable tool for understanding contains within it the potential for harm. This is the paradox of certain methods of preservation: they capture something essential while simultaneously threatening damage. The old mercury thermometers are more elegant than their digital replacements. But they can break. The mercury can spill. What is used to measure wellness can poison.

Patient was about illness and endurance, about the body's departure from baseline and the instruments we use to track its return. But it was also about the danger of keeping certain things close, even when they're beautiful, even when they once served a purpose. Sometimes precision becomes toxicity. Sometimes the tools we've relied on need to be released, carefully, because we don't need their particular kind of fragility anymore.

I kept some elements with the idea of reuse, adding them to what I've come to think of as a "mighty mountain of potential"—that accumulation of materials that might find purpose in future work. This is the collector's eternal optimism, the belief that nothing is truly waste if you can imagine a context in which it becomes meaningful again. And given my instinct to collect, objects are a practical, compelling, intriguing means to present stories.

I'm aware of the burden of potential, how quickly a resource becomes a weight. The mountain grows while finished work does not, and at some point you have to ask whether you're saving materials or avoiding decisions. The dismantled pieces added to this pile: elements that once had clear purpose and context now waiting to be re-contextualized, re-purposed, re-imagined. Or perhaps just waiting.

There's a tension here between the collector and the curator, between the impulse to gather and the discipline to select. My work has always involved both. The Lovely and Amazing series was born from an inheritance I didn't choose—objects left behind that deserved attention, that asked to be seen and held and placed in relationship to one another. The Two Plus series was born from my own accumulation over time, from friendships and relationships that left their traces in objects.

What happens when the work of examination is complete? When you've looked at the objects, arranged them, understood what they have to say to one another, and the conversation is finished? Do you keep the evidence of that conversation, or do you release it?

The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari wrote that

a life that makes the greatest number of connections to other things and alters itself in the process is a life lived to its fullest.

This quote has guided much of my thinking about objects and their relationships. The time spent selecting, caressing, arranging, and fixing objects in place is time spent making connections—between the objects themselves, certainly, but also between my past and present, between memory and material, between what was left behind and what I choose to carry forward.

Part of me wishes I hadn't destroyed so much of the Two Plus series. The work represented years of thinking about connection and relationship, about how objects embody characteristics of people and places, about the careful choreography required to bring disparate elements into accord. Each box was a study in restraint, an exercise in resisting my natural inclination to solve problems by adding more. I had learned to reposition, to remove, to trust that relevance and significance were enough. Destroying the series meant destroying that evidence, that record of learning.

But I did destroy it, and I had good reason. The pieces were taking up space—physical space in the studio, but also psychic space. They represented a completed inquiry, a question I had asked and answered as fully as I could. To keep them akin to trying to live inside a finished sentence. And there was something else: some of what is left behind, such as memories and stories, seems out of sync with the physicalness of these works. These nearly intangible elements are emerging as an additional interest, a new focus in my practice.

The Lovely and Amazing series was about working with what they left behind, the dimensional weight of their physical lives. But what about the memories and stories, the things that can't be held in a box or secured with careful construction? These intangibles demand different forms, different approaches. Perhaps the destruction of the Two Plus series was necessary to make room for this shift.

The dismantling created an opening, a clearing. It left me feeling not empty, but expectant. As if by taking apart the containers I had used to examine connection and relationship, I released those questions to take new forms.

When I first started making books, I reveled in the act of creating portable and intimate physical spaces, both the book itself and the pages within capable of depth and motion. This translated into the creation of works with less interactivity—arrangements that stayed put. There is an upside (and obvious downside) to losing that interactivity. I'm an advocate of setting parameters as a creative tool, of accepting constraints as productive rather than limiting. The shift from books to boxes was one such constraint. The decision to destroy the boxes perhaps another.

The mercury thermometers are gone, but the question they represented persists: how do we measure what matters? How do we give form to experience? I'm left with the memory of how solid those boxes were, how much force was required to take them apart, and the odd satisfaction of destroying what I had made with such care.

It's a kind of permission to build well and then let go, to trust that the value of the work wasn't in its permanence but in the making, in the questions it allowed me to ask and the connections it allowed me to examine. The mountain of potential remains, waiting. And the space that the Two Plus series once occupied is now available for whatever needs to emerge next.

What remains are photographs, memories, and the practice itself—the habit of looking at objects and asking what they can tell us about relationships, about characteristics, about personalities both real and imagined. The work involved preservation, collection, identity, storytelling. When successful, it avoided nostalgia.

I think now that nostalgia is what happens when we try to preserve without transformation, when we mistake the container for the thing contained. The boxes in the Two Plus series were never meant to preserve the objects themselves—those could have stayed in drawers, in closets, in the mighty mountain of potential. The boxes were meant to create a space where relationships could be examined, where connections could be made visible.

By destroying them, I haven't destroyed those connections. I've released them from their fixed arrangements, made them available for different configurations. The objects that related to specific characteristics, to particular individuals, to times and places in my history—these relationships still exist, even without their carefully constructed containers.

The nearly intangible elements, the memories and stories that seem out of sync with the physicalness of assemblage work, may require a different kind of container. Or no container at all. Maybe what's emerging is a practice less concerned with holding things in place and more interested in how things move, shift, reconfigure themselves over time.

The hammer that broke apart those well-built boxes was an instrument of destruction, yes. But also of release. And of connection; making space for new relationships between what was and what might be, between the physical and the intangible, between the work of preservation and the work of letting go.

I don't need the presence of mercury in fragile glass tubes in my life. But I do need the question the thermometers represented: how do we measure the invisible? How do we track the movement from illness toward health, from grief toward something else? How do we create instruments precise enough to register change while remaining aware that the instruments themselves might be toxic, might be fragile, might need to be carefully released when their purpose is served?

These are the questions that persist after destruction. These are what remain when the physical work is gone. And these, perhaps, are what I've been trying to understand all along: not how to preserve what is left behind, but how to be altered by it, how to make connections that change us in the process, how to live—as Deleuze and Guattari suggested—a life to its fullest.

Space is cleared now. The mountain of potential waits. Intangible elements—memories, stories, the traces of lives lived—are asking for new forms, new ways of being held, new kinds of careful attention. I'm ready to listen and respond.

Handling History - working with glass plate negatives

Over the past 20 years, I've created four artist books from a collection of glass plate negatives that I inherited as part of a family archive. Here's a round-up of those books, with some work in progress images, and some thoughts about things that happened along the way.

The glass plate negatives that were made by George C. Wheeler, my great-grandfather, in the early years of the twentieth century. An editor at Western Farm Journal, George was also an amateur photographer. These fragile bits of silver emulsion and glass traveled from New York State to Manhattan, Kansas, then onward to Denver, Colorado during the depression, then to my home in Lake City, Colorado, and most recently, back to my studio in Denver. It is profoundly moving to work with such artifacts, struck as I am by the realization that I'm working with objects previously handled by a man who died many years before I was born; a man to whom I am genetically connected. I read words written by this same man, and view images seen and recorded through his eyes in a time when creating photographs was a very slow paced and thoughtful endeavor. For this series, I selected the negatives that were both in usable condition, and were relevant to other concerns I was working with during the time of creation. The remaining negatives were gifted to a private art school, one that still actively maintains a darkroom and teaches photo history.The question became how to turn such fragile artifacts into artists' books that others can hold and experience.

The first of the three books Boston - Sept 19, 1901, October 15, 1901 was created in 2007. It is in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum (a membership library that first opened its doors in 1807 - over a century before these negatives were made), using a selection of images that depict public areas in the Boston area.Although not my first time working with rigid pages, or with glass, these works introduced new challenges as the glass is thin and very brittle. Earlier glass page books relied on drilling holes through the glass. I was unwilling to risk shattering the negatives, so came up with an approach to binding the negatives without drilling holes. After some model making and material testing I opted to bind the glass plates across the spine using a wire-edge technique in which metal wire (brass, steel or copper) is attached to the edge of each stiff panel page by using a thin, strong material such as cloth or tyvek, then connecting the panels by wrapping thread around the exposed wires at regular intervals, using a figure eight sewing, typically with black suturing silk.In addition to the glass plates, I wanted to include chromogenic prints made from the negatives, and reproductions of the disintegrating envelopes the glass plates were stored in.So, at the fore edge of each negative, a second wire-edge hinge attaches a second rigid page that has, on one side, a chromogenic print and, on the other side an inkjet photographic print made from scans of the envelopes. In this way I was able to retain and present the cryptic notes my grandfather made on the envelopes. The negatives can be viewed from front or back.Having decided on the structure and selecting the negatives to use,I scanned them on a flatbed. The quality of the negatives is challenging - they are contrasty, very dense and soft focused plus they've been pretty well damaged with scratches and dings through the emulsion. I adjusted settings as needed but didn't make any repairs or attempt to camouflage any of the numerous light holes or scratches. The book covers are digital laser prints made from the envelope scans, surface treated with acrylic/paste mixture.

The second of the three - Boats - Summer 1901 was made in 2010 and is now in the collection at Stanford University Libraries. The structure is nearly identical to the first but I used starch filled book cloth instead of tyvek for the hinges. The images were made in Boston, I assume at Boston Bay Harbor. The third book, May 5, 1901, Brooklyn, was made in 2012 and is now in the collection at University of Washington Libraries. The covers of this book are relief prints made using placemats belonging to the Wheeler household.At this point, I'd begun transitioning from the utility of the drop-spine box towards dual purpose containers that work as an extension of the book itself, not merely as protective storage. This box includes a photographic image on the inside cover, and an etched mica title label on the front cover. The tray is wrapped with pasted cloth made specifically for this project.

That these negatives survived, and ended up in my studio, is thanks to my great-aunt Ruth Wheeler. Ruth was legal guardian of my orphaned father so effectively became my grandmother. She was also the unofficial steward of the Wheeler family possessions and kept a wide range of ephemera and artifacts created and gathered by her parents and siblings.

The last of these books, Baby Ruth One, was created in 2015 and is in my personal collection. The box measures 8 x 7.25 x 2.2 inches (closed); the book opens to 15 x 8 x 8 inches. The negatives in this piece are the are the only images I've ever seen of my great-aunt Ruth as an infant and toddler; photographs of a toddler who grew into a woman I loved and respected, a woman whose curious, hard-working nature, has impacted my life daily.I designed a more complex wire-edge structure that provides better protection for the negatives than the earlier books. For each page I created a multi-layered sandwich of boards; the innermost layer of slightly thicker board than the negative depth, with the window cut outs sized to hold the glass plate in place without letting anything else touch it except along the edges.The layered boards made it possible to embed the hinges in between the book boards, so the hinge edges aren't at risk of being caught and inadvertently peeled up. The pages are quite thick, so instead of thin metal rods, I used plastic tubing (although it is completely hidden from view) and a more robust, waxed linen thread.Those pages alternate with boards that hold chromogenic prints and images of the original envelope notes, mounted on thin swing board panels that can rotate within the page, in an adaptation of a Hedi Kyle structure that goes by various names.I designed the pages with large margins of the book board framing the artifacts - this allowed me to insert textual references in the form of captions - words scanned from George Wheeler's notes: "Baby Ruth", "short exposure", dates and his signature.These were digitally etched in to the treated book boards using scans of his writing. This step required lot of extra effort, but including facsimiles of his handwriting created a valuable feeling of connection to George.The boards, first treated with shellac to inhibit moisture migrating from the surface treatments, have layers of acrylic paint that is selectively sanded and waxed. I love the rich and textured surfaced created with this technique and continue using it today.For the book cover, I inserted a small head shot of Ruth that is also a 4x5 inch plate but that was cropped with tape.The colophon is housed in a paper wrapper that is recessed into the last page of the book, and the front cover features a much smaller image of Ruth, also sandwiched between boards.

These four books preserve not only George Wheeler's images, but also Ruth's legacy - transforming fragile family artifacts into enduring works that honor both their lives and the connections between generations. They were created as part of the ongoing Lovely and Amazing series - an ongoing project that celebrates both the life of Ruth Wheeler and her many gifts to me through my early years.Ruth was a beloved biology teacher, naturalist, youth advocate and feminist who lived and worked in north Denver for 70 years. She found the natural world a place of endless delight and shared her enthusiasm with many, including myself, her great-niece. During her final years, I often stayed with her during my visits to Denver. During those visits she encouraged me take on the role of steward for her various and numerous collections, no doubt fearing they wouldn't survive otherwise. She left behind a collection of biological specimens, notes and photographs which I have incorporated into a series of three-dimensional collages, sculptural boxes, and artist books. More importantly, she gave me a great curiosity about the world we live in, a love of solitude in wild places and her role modeling as a fearless and adventuresome woman navigating solo through the world.Ruth kept a commonplace book - hers was mainly a collection of cherished poems that she copied out in her distinctive hand. Dozens of poems, mostly celebrating the wonder of both the natural world and youthful curiosity. She was a reader, not a writer, but this commonplace book does have one short poem by her - and it includes the phrase Lovely and Amazing. I adopted this phrase to use as title for this ongoing series.

I starting working with this family archive in 1999. Selections from the Lovely and Amazing series have been featured in numerous exhibitions over the decades. This way of working with inherited artifacts has influenced other projects (such as the Two Plus series) and individual pieces since then. I have opted to transform many of these objects, rather than merely preserving them, with an eye towards preserving what I find relevant and poignant about their continued existence.Many of the pieces in this series, along with the process notes and materials, are held by Special Collections at University of Denver Libraries.