Work Should Sit Like a Wound, Not a Window
Art is often framed as a window: an invitation to look out, or in. A glimpse into another world. But I cannot bring myself to believe that. I don’t think art provides us with perspective. It doesn’t clarify or explain. It ruptures. It stains. It exposes the failure of language and the limits of understanding. And it doesn’t resolve. I don’t hear the crescendo. I feel the lingering unease.
When I say a work should sit like a wound, not a window, I’m not trying to be poetic. I’m describing what happens. The work doesn’t frame reality—it breaks it open. Not just for the viewer, but for me. The making itself is the wound: a confrontation with pressure, contradiction, memory, desire. It’s a battle within the self. The artifact that results is not the art. It is a trace of the event. A leftover. A residue. What remains after the process has already torn something loose.
If I’m right, then art is the process, not the product. The labor, the compulsion, the act of pushing against resistance? That is the work. The object, the “thing”, is incidental. It might be seen, misunderstood, discarded. It might even move someone. But its meaning is not inherent. It is not a message to decode or a truth to uncover. It’s a wound site. It holds the history of what happened, the experiences, the labor, the suffering. Nothing more.
I don’t make work to express myself. I don’t make it for others. I don’t make out of want, but of need. I make because not making would be worse. The compulsion to make is born from rupture: sometimes personal, sometimes cultural, sometimes material. Making is how I confront it. The process is frictional. Sometimes violent. And always unfinished. I make because of the wound. And in making, I wound again. The act both deepens and treats. It is both puncture and poultice.
When someone encounters the work, they don’t complete it. They aren’t going to unlock something hidden. What they’re doing, if they’re really present and engaging, is beginning their own process. The artifact can provoke, but it doesn’t instruct. What happens next belongs to them. Their discomfort, their confusion, their lingering thoughts? That’s not my art. It’s theirs.
I continue to reject the idea that the viewer is a co-creator. My process ends where theirs begins. The artifact is a hinge between two equal but unrelated events. It doesn’t require their presence to be valid, nor do they need to understand it to be changed by it. If it disturbs them, unsettles them, wounds them—good. But that isn’t evidence of communication. That’s evidence of feeling. And that’s a different thing entirely.
A wound resists closure. Refuses narrative. Bleeds across boundaries. I don’t want work that wraps itself up in conclusion or resolves neatly. I want work that leaks. That continues to cause trouble after it’s gone. The wound isn’t a symbol. It’s a condition. And the artifact is only the bandage; soaked, marked, and left behind.
The world does not need more legible ideas or clean messages. It needs art that confronts. That costs something to make and to witness. That’s what I aim for. Not completion. Not beauty. Just impact. Just consequence.
So when I say a work should sit like a wound, I mean: it should interrupt. It should remain. It should remind you, long after you leave, that something happened, even if you can never quite name what.
Art is not what you see. Art is what happened; and what never stops happening.