Looking back across the archive — the works, the notes, the essays, the glyphs, the materials — a shape is becoming visible that was not apparent at the start. It is not the shape I would have designed if I had begun with a design. It is more like the shape that a path makes when you look back from a sufficient distance: not straight, not planned, but coherent in retrospect in a way it could not have been in prospect.
The practice has been moving, consistently and without deliberate intention, toward a single set of questions: what is a mark? What does it know about the world that the person who made it did not fully know? What is the relationship between the act of making and the duration of what is made? Who was the mark for, and does it matter?
These are not questions I set out to investigate. They are questions the practice has been generating, and which the essays and notes have been attempting to articulate as they arise.
This is the correct direction of travel for an inquiry: from the work outward to the questions the work is asking, rather than from predetermined questions inward toward confirming answers. The work knows more than the maker. The practice knows more than the plan. The inquiry follows.