Thing Still Inside Me Without a

The piece is the refusal to finish it. That’s the whole point, and also what makes me nervous.

I started trying to name what I was working with and kept circling back to the same dead end — the thing doesn’t have a name because it isn’t done becoming whatever it’s going to be. So the image became the process: wax half out of the mold, still soft at the shoulder, dripping at the base where I left it overnight. I wanted the viewer to feel the same held breath I was sitting in.

Digital felt right because I could iterate without committing to the wax version — burning through material that’s not actually there. The brass armature is a fiction too. Nothing in the image is permanent and the piece knows it.

The detail that’s mine, I think, is the warm glow leaking through the upper edge. I kept pushing it warmer until it read less like fire and more like a body under skin. That’s where the real thing lives, in that bleed.

What I’m uncertain about: whether showing something unfinished counts as honesty or as a dodge. I’ll know in a year.