WITHOUT YOU I AM NOTHING (2019)

This book, illustrated and composited throughout the second semester of my last year at Sheridan College, is a funny thing to me. Its written contents are entirely collected from journals that I kept over the previous three years: scraps of thoughts, poetry, fear poorly disguised (though an all-encompassing sense of wonder is laid equally as bare), bits of sincerity, of grief, of love.

As I look back on these pages (in August of 2019, only four short months after the book’s completion), I have to grin widely - at the hurried construction, the guesswork, the frustration that coloured my last semester of school. I was trying to make something that meant something with thoughts that had aged out of my life, dipping my fingers into my past and trying to paint something new.

The assembly of this book was, I think, an act of clinging. Now I understand that it is what I needed to create in order to release — to open my hands anew.

Here are a few of my favourite spreads. The original book is 66 pages.