Excavating Through Time | The Strength of What Remains

There are moments in an artist's life when a material becomes more than something to work with. It becomes a way of understanding something that has existed within us for years, perhaps even decades, waiting to be recognized.

For me, that material is concrete.

When I first began working with concrete compound, I became fascinated by its raw, unmixed state. Loose, fragile, uncertain. It held the potential to become something substantial, yet it could not achieve that transformation on its own.

I began to recognize something of myself in it.

Twenty years ago, a traumatic brain injury profoundly changed the course of my life. There was a person I had known before the accident, and there was the person I would gradually come to know afterward. Between those two versions of myself lay years of uncertainty, adaptation, loss, discovery, and an ongoing process of becoming.

Concrete undergoes its own transformation when introduced to water. What was once loose and vulnerable begins to bind together, eventually becoming something capable of remarkable strength.

I see a parallel in my own life.

The experiences that followed my injury became the elements through which I was reshaped. Not suddenly, and certainly not without difficulty. Strength came gradually, through learning to navigate a world that no longer felt quite the same, through finding new ways to understand myself, and through discovering that what had changed did not necessarily mean that everything had been lost.

Yet concrete, even after it hardens, remains capable of cracking. Its strength does not make it invulnerable.

Neither does mine.

Perhaps that is what draws me most deeply to this material. It holds contradiction within its very nature. It can be strong and fragile, permanent and impermanent, resistant and vulnerable.

In creating Excavating Through Time, I am not attempting to illustrate my brain injury. I am exploring the relationship between material, memory, and transformation. Through building, layering, scraping, and exposing surfaces, I am allowing the work to reveal something about the passage of time and the experiences that shape us.

I have come to understand that strength is not necessarily about returning to who we once were. Sometimes it is about discovering who we have become.

And perhaps, like concrete, we carry within us both the evidence of our fractures and the remarkable strength of what remains.