Before before (Erasures)
Before, before: Erased, Rewritten
Erasure, in the cultural and historical sense, is often an act of violence—the removal of voices, histories, and entire populations from narratives that should hold them. But in art, erasure can be an act of uncovering rather than obliterating. It is not about deletion, but revelation.
In my erasure work, the original text is never truly gone—it lingers in the negative space, in the memory of what was removed. The process is about re-seeing, about finding new connections and unexpected stories not immediately visible.
In the late 1990s, I was inspired by "The Humument" by Tom Phillips —a visual novel that reimagined an existing book by erasing, obscuring, and leaving behind a new, layered narrative. Each page was both a visual artifact and a rewritten story, a conversation between what was and what could be.
At the same time, I was immersed in another form of transformation—the digital world. I was programming, running an internet business and navigating the early digital grid as it rewrote communication, commerce, and connection. Yet even as I learned and built within this new language of code, I remained drawn to the written word—its weight, its histories, its ability to be both technically directive (SELECT * FROM table_1 JOIN table_2 USING (id)) and poetically beautiful ("A word after a word after a word is power." – Margaret Atwood).
These erasures live at the intersection of those ideas: the old and the new, text and image, presence and absence. Some pages unravel meaning, others create unexpected juxtapositions. Some are deliberate, others are playful misinterpretations. But all of them are about seeing differently—revealing something never meant to be read.
These pieces are among the oldest in this particular online portfolio, and they still resonate with me. Perhaps because I am always erasing and rewriting, redacting and reconstructing myself —finding new meaning in what remains. I guess we all are.