French linen, inkjet and pigment on fabric, threads, wood

I’ve long wandered in search of my querencia—a sanctuary not bound by walls or distance. A safe place stretches beyond a space in reality; it is an object, a memory, a feeling. I found it far beyond the noise, in the stillness of solitude.

High in the Alps, where a cabin clings to the mountaintop, I became weightless, unmoored. Between miles, I was isolated; behind the noise, I was detached. And yet, I was present. The cabin was my querencia. The moments of piecing myself together was my querencia. The solitude itself became my querencia.

My querencia is fluid, elusive—a space within spaces, where being takes shape. It’s in the fading of the world, in those suspended moments when only essence remains, and where I face myself.

*A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.

—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Photo book to be posted soon..