I’ve been writing and weaving, A LOT. Let me break it down into more digestible parts—in this order: Thinking with the Loom, Double Weave, Cayley’s Gameˆ𝟚, and the paper I’m presenting at this year’s Modernist Studies Association conference in the UK.

Thinking with the Loom:

Last September, I had the privilege of attending the Newbury School of Weaving with support from one of my weaving guilds. Newbury gives students the opportunity to reconnect with handweaving prior to the 20th-century Arts and Crafts revival.

Last Thursday, I gave a public talk on my experience titled “Thinking with the Loom.”

My talk was a recap of my five-day intensive at the school, where I wove a 44” woolen crossbar check throw on a counterbalance loom from the year 1820. I discussed the entire process, from winding the warp to darning and wet finishing. I also mused on weaving—particularly on a counterbalance loom—as an embodied practice, a through-going structure.

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I’m humbled to present alongside such provocative scholars as Dr Catriona McAra, author of The Medium of Leonora Carrington: A Feminist Haunting in the Contemporary Arts; Dr Nisha Ramayya, author of Fantasia; and Dr Alison Sperling, author of “Weird Queer Ecologies” in The Weird: A Companion and currently completing a monograph titled Weird Modernism.

This year’s MSA and BAMS topic is Weird Modernisms. The conference celebrates Modernism as strange, queer, uncanny, occult, and above all, WEIRD. Since the foundational work of Viktor Shklovsky, Modernism has been aligned with the idea of ‘making strange’. Following Shklovsky, this has usually been understood as a creative act of defamiliarization, the work of presenting the taken-for-granted with new and puzzling perspectives.

The MSA and BAMS joint conference takes this heritage and refracts it to consider the concept of Weird Modernism in a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary context. Whether as genre in its own right or a lens to highlight non-normative experience, the weird both encourages alternative ways of thinking about the form, style and ethics of Modernist cultural production and typifies the encounter with Modernism’s experimental modes.

Abstract: “Exploring the Parafloral: Mediumship and Plant-Human Entanglement”

The art world has taken an interest in plant-human entanglement in recent years, reflected in the exhibitions The Botanical Mind, Floral Fantasies, and Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers. Yet, art historical scholarship rarely explores the ecological connections among spiritualism, vegetal life, mediumship, and the animate natural world. This omission is especially striking in the context of the visual and material culture of spiritualism, a movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and asserted a spirit world alongside our reality. My research, which I call parafloral, examines the symbiosis among plants, spirits, and mediums, suggesting that plants were central, not peripheral, to spiritualist practice.

This paper highlights a novel, ecocritical direction for the historical study of mediumistic practice through analysis of automatic and spirit drawings, as well as first-person accounts of mediumistic practice. This study deconstructs the human-centered interpretation of plants by examining how vegetal and spirit life intertwine through a phenomenological lens. I ask: What if automatic drawings are not simply reflections of a medium’s subconscious, but co-productions, traces of contact among human, plant, and spirit? This approach allows us to interrogate not only what these images mean, but what they do. I contend that they enact forms of relation, perception, and co-presence that challenge boundaries between material and immaterial, self and other, life and afterlife. This interpretation situates plants as agents, collaborators, and messengers in a cosmology that refuses to segregate nature from spirit.

Now, let’s talk about parallel events, or the fictive nature of temporal order and diverging temporalities. More oft than not, I tend to gesture toward infinity (“where the origin and end of things disappear”), or what the ancient Greeks understood as horror: a chaotic disorder.

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I recently reread Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, followed by a rewatching of Neil Jordan’s 1994 cinematic adaptation. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Louis. Toward the end of the novel, Louis speaks of his relationship to art, a passage that gutted me only in its relatability, though I must note that I have freed myself of the institutional affiliation that influenced such thinking:

Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The magnificent paintings of the Louvre were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Like Claudia, severed from her mother, preserved for decades in pearl and hammered gold. Like Madeleine’s dolls. And of course, like Claudia and Madeleine and myself, they could all be reduced to dust.

After years working in an academic art department that left me oddly isolated from art history — I was focused more on the intersection of art history and technology, something I long to decenter more than anything — I’ve [temporarily] lost trust in my ability to write, to engage with and read an image, to be read by an image, to desire it, to be desired, to be consumed and possessed.

Everything feels like:

a slippery circle -

an investigation of holes -

the tongue of an edge -

a unity of contradictions -

a container overflowing with its emptiness -

Misled by my own mind, I’ve been searching for answers when what I truly need are better questions. I’ve felt distracted by what seems like a slow erosion of meaning in my life — but that isn’t quite right. Instead, I seem to be mourning research topics (and selves) that once, for decades, I was passionately devoted to. Those subjects no longer serve the same purpose, who I once was is no longer. They haven’t vanished so much as been replaced. What feels like a death is, in truth, evolution.

[Insert Alice (the self as puzzle): “But if I am not the same, the next question is ‘who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!]

Yet, I still manage to maintain a constructive philosophical engagement with art historical practices. I seem to have forgotten that I am writing a paramonograph on the expression of plants in the visual and material culture of spiritualism. This work offers a historical perspective based on archival material followed by a speculative reading. I find nothing more pleasurable than writing a different kind of art history, one that attends to the weaker links, cultivating complexity, raising crucial speculative questions, particularly about the nature of reality, post-mortem consciousness, and the network of affiliations between mediums, spirits, and plants.

I’ve been trying to remember what the oscillations of my research on consciousness and the more-than-human world looked like prior to my life in Western Massachusetts— both the state of my consciousness then and its subsequent fragmentation and transformation.

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation.

-William James

It does not feel unrelated that, amid what seems like years of intellectual uncertainty, I returned to weaving.

My practice is theoretically motivated yet deeply engaged with mathematics, loom technicalities, and the pedagogical possibilities of weaving beyond the loom, including the development of new structures and modes of thinking. It is the development of new structures that I want to continue to sit with.

We’re topologically deformed. Our exteriors constantly interrupting our interiors. I want to hear about your spacial reconstruction. What are you thinking? What forms do you have your hands on?

Tell me about your holes.

Yours,

△

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I’m still doing plenty of art history research, but I don’t feel much like an art historian anymore. My work is shaped by lots of different kinds of arrangements.

Speaking of which, I’m in the early phase of developing a new lecture series on visual thinking, specifically geometric and diagrammatic methods. This series with a focus on the philosophy of the diagram explores a multiplicity of histories, theories, and practices from literature, mathematics, arts and crafts, digital humanities, and occult and magical practice. We’ll explore how diagrammatic methods are not only valuable pedagogical devices but speculative and theoretical methodological tools for constructing new realities.

We’ll explore the works of Ramon Lull, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Lewis Carroll, Ada Dietz, Hilma af Klint, Anatoly Fomenko, and many others, alongside primary texts such as William Hogarth’s geometric symbolism, in addition to texts by Martin Gardner, Deleuze and Guattari, Rudolf Arnheim, Katie King, Johanna Drucker, Barbara Maria Stafford, Kamini Vellodi, Eugenie Brinkema, and others.

I may even include an experimental weaving exercise.

Stay tuned!

I want to be honest about the ways in which our lives change, and that mine these days feels like a not-yet-schematized grid.

That mine mind these days feels chaotic. Perhaps this is another iteration of Dionysian consciousness? I truly feel mad. I’d love to poison you with stories of how I’ve been ravaged by intellectual ecstasy — when I felt the slipperiness of language penetrate the labyrinth of sulci floating in cerebrospinal fluid. Unfortunately, I’m thinking about vector psychology — that is, typological psychology, and how I might hallucinate a missing dimension. Don’t ask. I won’t tell.

Diagrammatics enfold ideas, and lately the multiplicitous interaction of grids — their infinite arrival — has acted as a guiding tool for constructing new realities. I can't do anything without thinking about diagrammatics (or theoretical diagrams), putting multiple forms in dialogue. It's almost pathological. Topological? I have to live with it. Remember, and to use a grid metaphor: "Humanity and its products emerge from a mesh of interconnected materials, worlds, and subjects."

I want to talk more about chaos — specifically the basics of chaos control, feedback and non–feedback algorithms for chaos control. I suffer from intrusive thinking.

This post is mostly about weaving, or is it about chaos? Doesn’t matter. I have to include how disenchanted I've become working in an academic art department (I’ll avoid Nietzschean antidotes about the art of tragedy), and how slow craft and my complex relationship to mathematics has not only relivened me, but has also altered my thinking. The direction of my life is changing. For this, I’m grateful.

Chaos magic posits nothing has ultimate truth. Anything remains possible.

Weaving is a form of magic. It is not only an act of discovery that invites multiple readings, it has also cleared my mind of much of the stress that has plagued me for three years, though once the numbers are gone, chaos returns. Amidst the chaos, however, weaving has brought clarity in the avenues I not only want to pursue but need to pursue in the future.

Though I hail from art history, most people know my relationship to the discipline is fraught — that I maintain an obliquity to established disciplines, to fields in general. Any writing I do that may be crudely, perhaps even offensively, categorized as ‘academic’ often cautions against expecting a neat assemblage of methodological boxes to be checked off. I'm dizzy from canonical dehiscence.

Like many of us in higher ed, I'm fucking over it, and am lucky to have found — and continue to search for — other creative ways of support that are available for contingent and independent scholars.

While I tend to stray from labels, I would be a liar if I said I didn't identify as an occultist, my quest is and will never will be complete.

I've dreamt a lot about animals this year. I even wrote about it in a post I published here on May 8 titled Psychic Ecologies & Dream Animals. Over the past month, I've been consistently dreaming of animals. One dream involved an unrecognizable creature hiding and jumping out at me in the bathroom. What made that dream especially strange was that I had it three times in a single night. Triplets.

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This morning, I spent the first hour upon waking contemplating cosmic and post-mortem diagrams. Diagrams are inherently metaphysical. They invite us to see what ought to be seen. They are tools that allow us to construct new realities.

Shit, even early metrology had a way of interacting with the supernatural. The earliest known monarchical dynasty in China based its calendar on a 10-day cycle, in which each day was associated with different spirits and dead ancestors. Diagrams oft use measurement as data points, to illustrate relationships.

What do I make of the diagram within automatic drawings produced by mediums, like the one featured above, juxtaposed with a tree-like network? A more detailed reading is to come. This is the introduction to a paper I’ve written, but will be rewriting, and likely rewrite again — again. The concept of the diagram alone helps us newly understand, and seems apt in, my work on thinking about the visual and material culture of spiritualism ecocritically.

I pulled a book of spiritualistic drawings from a bookshelf at home. I wanted to start writing, but had to tend to other graphic charts in art history. I felt the rupture and wanted to be suffocated with a mesh. Don’t worry mathematical foreplay is heavy throughout my in-process novella, a mathematically grotesque work that can’t seem to edge its way out of an angle.

Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt points out in their essay “The Art of the Diagram”:

The use of the graphic chart in art history is closely connected to the process of academizing the discipline after 1800, as it accompanied text to simply illustrate greater historical context, to provide a more precise image of the past. This logic of making distinctions was heavily pursued by the avant-garde over the course of the 19th century, but mainly in the 20th century, the diagram became an important tool for analysis in art.

This semester, I’m teaching a session on computational network analysis as part of an art history course on modernism and the avant-garde. Art history is full of interconnected systems: artists, artworks, movements, patrons, workshops, and concepts…

Artists themselves have long explored network-like structures, especially in avant-garde periodicals following World War I. In some cases, magazine advertisements even functioned as proto-network diagrams, allowing artists to experiment with visualizing form, connectivity, and conceptual relationships.

This post began with a photograph of a diagram featured on the back cover of one of the sexiest weaving books in my personal library.

I'm two weeks away from my intensive class at the Newbury School of Weaving, where I'll be at the loom for eight hours a day, and just six days away from the Reverse Drafting Club virtual meet-up, hosted by The Weaving Mill, where we'll be unraveling fabric swatches and diagramming their construction using weave draft notation.

Tangle yourselves in a web.

Yours,

△

One of the foundations of modernity is the creation of generalized rules and categories, measurement being a key example. I remember my weaving mentor once told me: MEASURE ALL THE TIME!

I can’t help but think of emergent forms of measurement, like the Sámi concept of parankusema, a unit of distance roughly equivalent to six miles. The term literally translates to “reindeer’s piss,” referring to the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to urinate. Other units are equally imaginative, if not absurd, such as the fathom, originally defined as the span of a person’s outstretched arms. Now is a good time to think about zero or nothingness.

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Last night I felt ethereal, like a hazy shade of saffron yellow, from the systemic taxonomy of colors, resembling the wings of a goldfinch, canary bird (animal); yellow jasmine (vegetable); high-coloured sulphur (mineral) — as seen in Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts (1821).

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A few months ago, I was invited by Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions to blog about my parafloral research, a new ecocritical approach to mediumistic practice and the visual and material culture of spiritualism. My work suggests that plants were central, not peripheral, to spiritualist practice and visual culture. Read my post here: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/08/03/exploring-parafloral-mediumism-and-plant-human-entanglement.

Harvard Divinity school’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi initiative explores how plant and fungal life challenge our understanding of mind, matter, and the human relationship to the more-than-human world. The project asks core questions: What is intelligence? Where and how does it exist? What is matter, and how do we define it as animate or inanimate? How can we extend care to nonhuman life? And how might the study of plants shift our view of humanity’s place among other beings?

I hope you enjoy this post, and of course, stay tuned for more, as my work continues to evolve with additional publications and upcoming events. This piece is more historically grounded, in contrast to two conference papers I presented this summer, which explored more speculative and metaphysical themes (including speculative questions around nonlocal theories of consciousness and theoretical physics). Both dimensions will be incorporated into my larger project.

I’ve been thinking a lot, per usual, about the history of art history. While reading Dore Bowen’s essay recently, “With One Eye on the Wild: Michael Ann Holly and The Wolf of Gubbio,” she spoke of Holly’s fascination with “those twentieth-century European figures who, at odds with prevailing tendencies of their era, renovated our understanding of how works of art function in time.” Hilma af Klint is one such artist, which brings me back to a paper I gave in 2023, “Past-Future, Present-Future, Future-Future: Hilma af Klint in Three Temporal Dimensions,” for the Modernist Futures conference, hosted by Modernist Studies in Asia. Since the paper was delivered at the conference only, I thought I’d post it here.

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“Past-Future, Present-Future, Future-Future: Hilma af Klint in Three Temporal Dimensions”

In 1932, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) wrote in her notebook that her [spiritual] work should not be shown for twenty years after her death. She would spend the final decades of her life preparing a spiritually complex diagrammatic language to be understood by future generations. Forty-two years would pass before her [spiritual] work was brought to the attention of an international audience for the first time in Maurice Tuchman’s exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1986 (1986).

Despite the exhibition’s groundbreaking historical narrative demonstrating the inextricable link between esoteric spirituality and modern abstract painting, af Klint’s spiritual vision was not yet ready to be received. In 2018, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s record-breaking exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future established her future had arrived. The present-future of twenty-first century capitalism, however, is fraught with a complicated aesthetic consumption where af Klint has become a brand and her spiritual vision a commodity.

This talk critically examines two important choices made by af Klint and her family: her decision to not show her [spiritual] works until twenty years after death and her family’s prohibition against the sale of her work. These choices are not insignificant. In fact, they can be understood as acts of resistance against the contemporary consumerist impulse.

Framed and supported by philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s expansion of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of creation in his book Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, or simply, “each act of creation resists something,” I explore af Klint’s and her family’s choices as acts of resistance against the consumer culture in which her work has become entrenched, and speculate on whether the art establishment’s decided future for af Klint aligns with her original vision.

Since Deleuze doesn’t define what he means by “to resist,” Agamben questions what’s left unsaid in Deleuze’s theory. With a focus on potential, Agamben explores the relationship between resistance and creation and how the action of resistance expresses itself in the act of creation. In doing so, he investigates potential: the potential-to, defined as the impersonal or creative potential of the artist and the potential-not-to or the resistance existent in the act of creation.

If we consider af Klint’s creative process and potential in Agamben’s terms – that is, the potential-to and the potential-not-to, we can begin to explore her and her family’s choices as acting and resisting at once. Now, imagine yourself in Sweden during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and consider af Klint’s resistance to the past-future as integral to her forward-looking vision.

In 1906, af Klint began her well-known series the Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), a commission she accepted from a spirit guide during a séance that would comprise of 193 works drawn from her spiritual practice. This series was a departure from her academic training at The Technical School in Stockholm in 1880 and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts she attended between 1882-1887. She worked professionally as a portraitist and landscape painter after graduation. And, only a few years before serious development of the Paintings for the Temple, af Klint worked as an illustrator at the Institute of Veterinary Medicine.

In tandem, she founded the séance group The Five (De Fem) in 1896 with four other women producing 100s of automatic drawings and regularly attended meetings at the Edelweiss Society, a spiritualist organization. At this time, her decision to keep her professional and spiritual life separate, only sharing her spiritual works with a select few, demonstrates her artistic potential and her calculated resistance to sharing her spiritual vision too early.^[1] By 1919, however, af Klint began to compile what scholar Julia Voss has described as “The Suitcase Museum,” which contained miniature watercolors of her spiritual works, including the Paintings for the Temple. In Hilma af Klint: A Biography, Voss uncovers af Klint’s two-decade long attempt at finding a public space for her spiritual works. Yet, she was met with resistance and chose to preserve the works for an unknown future.

It's likely the resistance toward her work in the past-future influenced her decision to not show her work for twenty years after death with the hope they would be better understood by future generations. Af Klint states: “The experiments I have conducted…that were to awaken humanity when they were cast upon the world were pioneering endeavors. Though they travel through much dirt they will yet retain their purity.”^[2] Her interest in purity suggests freedom from outside influence. She made sure to preserve the unadulterated state of her works for a time by stipulating in her notebook that her spiritual works not be shown until at least twenty years after death.^[3] Her acts of creation might be understood as acts of resistance toward a public she felt not yet prepared to receive the spiritual knowledge transmitted through her work, and perhaps resistance to the increasingly materialistic world developing at the turn of the century.

We’re confronted with a very present and complicated dialectic in af Klint’s act of creation that is supported by Agamben’s two-fold structure of potential, a term he defines as “an ambiguous being that not only is capable of something and of its opposite, but contains in itself an intimate and irreducible resistance.”^[4] The impersonal or potential-to points toward af Klint’s ability to exercise creative expression and the potential-not-to highlights her reticence and resistance to further attempts at sharing her spiritual work during her time. Her resistance in action demonstrates remarkable restraint and the importance of preserving the work’s potential for future generations.

The relationship between potential-to and potential-not-to thus far is as follows: Af Klint acted in 1906 by accepting the commission from one of her spirit guides [Amaliel]; She acted in 1919 by developing the “suitcase museum” to engage a broader public; She resisted showing her spiritual works, stipulating in her notebook in 1932 they not be shown until at least twenty years after death. To echo Agamben: “Mastery preserves and exercises in action not its potential to play but its potential not to play.”^[5] Af Klint’s decision not to play and preserve her paintings for an uncertain future after decades of concentrated effort in the careful production of esoteric art is a testament to action as resistance.

As we now arrive in the present-future, it’s important to note that af Klint likely anticipated a future of seekers prepared for understanding the synthesis of spiritual and scientific ideas present in her work as mechanisms to teach us something about the world and ourselves. Permeated with cosmological, scientific, and geometric motifs, her recurrent use of the spiral, in particular, suggests her interest in evolution as equilibrium. She certainly imagined a world beyond division and hierarchy where humankind is capable of transcendence from earthly to higher spheres. Yet, the present-future in which the artworld established her anticipated future has arrived is all too earthbound.

In the fall of 2017, artists, curators, and art historians convened in Brooklyn, New York to address the work of af Klint and her status as a pioneer of abstraction, a conversation that continues today in myriad configurations. Moderated by Curator of Contemporary Art Helen Molesworth, one question stands out: “How has af Klint’s refusal to show her work until twenty years after she died, along with the prohibition against selling the work, affected our ability to narrativize her historically?”^[6] This certainly isn’t an obscure question considering commercialization of an artist’s work plays a role in determining artistic relevancy, authenticity, market value, and the depth of their cultural and intellectual influence.^[7]

In 2018, the Guggenheim Museum opened the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, a curious title in its finite infinitude assuring us that af Klint’s work still awaits an unknown future. Yet, then and now, academic and mainstream articles alike ooze futurist phrases asserting the present moment as the future she anticipated.^[8] It was af Klint’s wish that The Paintings for the Temple occupy a spiral temple. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum meets that criterion, as it is known for its distinctive spiral form. I wonder, though: Has af Klint’s anticipated future been reduced to the present-future’s needs?

Since the exhibition, companies have adapted af Klint’s aesthetics, even her name, in order to promote their brands. Hilma natural remedies is an herbal medicine brand whose founders took inspiration from af Klint’s engagement with the natural world.

To take the direct-to-consumer market further, mindfulness collective 3^rd Ritual’s logo appropriates af Klint’s visual lexicon and applies her soft color palette to promote their apothecary toolkit.^[9]

Af Klint’s spiritually significant symbology is reduced to merely ‘good design,’ as we see in the absence of her principal colors yellow (male) and blue (female) in their logo of concentric circles or the removal of the segmented triangle in the center that unites the dualities of light and dark and male and female, signifying af Klint’s interest in a higher unity. Although 3^rd Ritual’s mission statement highlights the importance of connection, their participation in breaking images places them in the category of “innocent vandals,” the language of Bruno Latour to describe those “who destroy not so much out of a hatred of images, but out of ignorance, a lust for profit.”^[10] Although the direct-to-consumer industry takes inspiration from af Klint’s aesthetic, it’s in fact a radical departure from her vision. As Voss states: “Hilma saw it her task to give form to new ideas and to ensure that others knew about them.” Manipulating af Klint’s symbology weakens her message and becomes the entrepreneur’s subject myth. It’s not my intention, however, to criticize but rather highlight the artist’s and her family’s acts of resistance to such materialist tokens.

Most recently, some of her family’s acts of resistance were tested when on November 14, 2022, The Gallery of Digital Assets (GODA) led by “some of the biggest names in consumer, art, music, NFT, and fashion,” such as recording artist Pharrell Williams, made available at auction NFTs (non-fungible tokens) based on af Klint’s series the Paintings for the Temple.^[11] Considering the prohibition against the sale and commercialization of af Klint’s physical works, NFTs are a way for third party companies to take what’s in the public domain, repurpose, and sell.

Writer Aliya Say spoke with former af Klint Foundation chair Johan af Klint and his niece Hedvig Ersman for a recent article published in “The Art Newspaper.” The article states: “The descendants point out, Hilma af Klint did not want her creations to be commercialised…moreover, af Klint intended for the Paintings for the Temple series to be kept and displayed together as one meta-project: a project for connecting with the divine.” The family points out af Klint’s resistance as well as their own resistance to the present-future of globalized consumer culture.

Ersman states further in a Twitter thread on November 9, 2022: “Commercializing af Klint’s abstract art contradicts her intensions with her art. She actively CHOSE not to put them on the commercial market, she did NOT intend them to be commercial “assets.” What is happening now is in opposition with her intensions.” It seems af Klint has encountered philosopher Guy Debord’s spectacle, where the spiritual knowledge to be gleaned in her work to unite humanity has become an ‘estranged representation.’ Is her spiritual message to humanity somewhat broken by the cult of capitalism?

If we circle back to Agamben and his ideas on creation as an act of resistance, along with his thoughts on ‘potential,’ or rather the ‘potential-not-to,’ he asserts a claim that supports af Klint’s creative action:

If creation were only potential-to-, which cannot but blindly cross into the act, art would lapse into execution, which proceeds with false confidence toward a complete form, since it has removed the resistance of the potential-not-to. Contrary to a common equivocation, mastery is not formal perfection but quite the opposite: it is the preservation of potential in the act, the salvation of the imperfection in the perfect form.^[13]

Af Klint was demonstrating her potential-to insofar as she was exercising her creative potential in her time. Yet, her creative process also highlights her potential-not-to when she decided it best not to show her spiritual works for twenty years after death, preserving the works’ potential for future generations by choosing the potential-not-to. The same applies to her family’s decision to prohibit the sale of af Klint’s works in any given future, an act of resistance that attempts to avoid reducing her paintings to materialist tokens and luxury commodities.

Af Klint’s resistance preserved the work from a past-future not yet prepared to receive her message. Her family’s resistance to monetize is an attempt at protecting the work from becoming mere commodity. Thus, to choose the potential-not-to is an act of resistance to preserve the works’ potential for a still unknown future. This resistance in action privileges af Klint’s work as spiritual epistemology — visual resources that transcend modern constructs of time and the capitalist machine. This resistance also suggests the present-future of twenty first-century capitalism is not quite in alignment with af Klint’s vision.

Af Klint’s work serves to bring forth a transformation in us, operating as a continuum, a space that prepares viewers for their evolution through stages and cycles of rebirth. Evolution of consciousness and human perception are major themes throughout her work. She explores evolution as an incomplete and always forming process of spiritual development. Yet, as both historically determined object and consumer product, historicization and the commodity culture of capitalism tend to reduce the infinite potential of af Klint’s work to something finite, something complete. In this way, I posit her future has not yet arrived — and perhaps it never will — until we acknowledge that duplication and mass production of her work breaks the image and, worse, concludes it.

We should be grateful to have received such an immersive space for contemplation, where deeper engagement can help us envision a new world, a future in which we too choose resistance. Perhaps this future is the one af Klint is waiting for: a future where her work is received as a form of resistance to materialist tokens and opens a path for spiritual renewal, where science and religio-philosophical syncretism are recognized as visual methods designed to teach us something about ourselves and the world. I’ve for years been skeptical of the art establishment’s decided future for af Klint, not convinced it’s in alignment with her vision.

In order to continue and muse on possible futures, it seems apt to end with a couple open questions rather than a conclusion:

• Has the consumerist impulse blinded us from seeing the future she anticipated?

• Have we missed the importance of the choices she and her family have made within the world of capitalism, and how those choices are, in fact, acts of resistance against consumerism?

[1] Certainly there's social factors involved, such as women’s role in society and the oft demonizing perception of their psychological state as mediums.

[2] Quoted in Anna Maria Svensson, “The Greatness of Things: The Art of Hilma af Klint,” in Hilma af Klint, ed. John Hutchinson, exh. cat (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2005), p. 17.

[3] This stipulation can be found in archival notebook Hak_1049 held at the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Sweden.

[4] Agamben, Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2029), 18-19.

[5] Ibid., 19.

[6] Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018).

[7] This article in Hyperallergic also questions whether 2018 was af Klint’s future, problematizing institutionally approved narratives: https://hyperallergic.com/472426/hilma-af-klint-paintings-for-the-future-solomon-r-guggenheim-museum/

[8] “The Future Belonged to af Klint,” Vulture article: https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/hilma-af-klint-paintings-for-the-future-at-guggenheim.html; “the future has now arrived” https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/record-breaking-show-arrives-in-sydney-and-reveals-a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-20210610-p5801j.html; etcetera.

[9] What you see in the af Klint work on the left is a segmented circle with light and dark on the left side and male (yellow) and female (blue) on the right. The triangle in the center also segmented unites these dualities and signifies her interest in a higher unity.

[10] Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 87-88.

[11] VR experiences inviting visitors to explore an af Klint–simulated spiritual world, and an AR app featuring eighteen of af Klint’s paintings, allowing users to place her works along a path in Regent’s Park in London, are just a few examples. Wellness brands are also engaging with her legacy in new ways. NFTs, which are digital identifiers that cannot be copied, are recorded on the blockchain and certify the authenticity and ownership of a digital file across various media.

[12] Article info; Hilma af Klint’s family criticises the NFT sale of the artist’s sacred paintings

[13] Agamben, 20.

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Yesterday, I attended an excellent New England Weavers’ Seminar (NEWS) workshop with Suzi Ballenger, focused on experimenting with weaving tools. The session primarily covered loom and tool modifications, such as rigging your loom and redesigning tools, as well as techniques for manipulating the warp. We spent a lot of time discussing specialized weaving tools, including the nami stick, comb reed, open reed, fan reed, expansion reed, railreed, and sectional rigid heddles.

After the workshop, I mentioned to Suzi that I was currently weaving name drafts. She asked: I wonder what overshot could look like with an open reed?

Overshot is made up of a sequence of 2-thread repeats: 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, and 1-4. These sequences can be repeated any number of times to elongate and create lines, curves, and shapes. These 2-thread repeats are often referred to as blocks or threading repeats, IE: 1-2 = block 1/A, 2-3 = block 2/B.

What would happen if I replaced my conventional reed with a supplemental beater or an open reed? An open reed, a modified reed that allows adjustable spacing between warp threads, offers a way to break from convention.

I’m nearly finished dressing my loom for a series of overshot name drafts titled Spectra of Graphs, Decomposition Theorem, 2D Lattice Graphs, and Dissection Problems. Overshot is a term commonly used to refer to a twill-based type of weave structure, ‘blockweave’ or ‘floatwork.’ To be honest, I really need a modified tool for this project, one for changing threading within the same warp…

Overshot is, traditionally, a pattern-based weaving. I'm interested in disrupting those patterns. To echo Suzi, “Patterning is not enough for me.”

During the class, I had the same thought I always do: I wish I had more time to dedicate to my weaving practice. Weaving is physically demanding, and in my opinion, it’s a slow craft, which is exactly why I love it.

Since April, I’ve been especially focused on transformation through weave drafts and cloth. I’ve taken both experimental and conventional drafting classes hosted by Catskill Weaving School, participated in the Transforming Our Tools and Weaving Wonders workshop at NEWS (which I reference here), and joined The Weaving Mill’s Reverse Drafting Club. I’m also about to become a member of The Complex Weavers, in additional to my existing memberships in The Hudson-Mohawk Weavers’ Guild (HMWG) and Weavers of Western Mass (WWM).

The Reverse Drafting Club includes a quarterly mailing of fabric swatches along with instructions for fabric analysis. Each installment features three swatches (categorized as easy, medium, and hard) to analyze, plus solutions to the previous quarter’s swatches. The club runs for 12 months, providing a hands-on, evolving study in textile structure.

In September, I’ll be spending five days at the Newbury School of Weaving. The historic equipment and traditional methods they use aren’t taught anywhere else. This class focuses on hands-on engagement with their antique looms and the specific techniques those tools were designed for.

Unlike courses that emphasize creating a collection of woven samples, this one offers a deep dive into the entire weaving process, with a strong emphasis on tools, technique, and materials. Balancing full-time work, a nearly full-time independent research and writing practice, and an intensive out-of-state weaving course for three consecutive weekends is a significant commitment, but I’m incredibly excited for the opportunity! I’m grateful to the HMWG for their generous grant, which helped make this possible.

I can’t talk about weaving without also talking about mathematics. My workshop yesterday took place in a classroom on the mathematics floor at Westfield State University. I wandered the halls before class, my eyes set on an abacus hanging on the wall.

"Measure all the time" is practically a motto in weaving, not to mention the constant counting. Naturally, I started thinking about how I’ve been neglecting the writing for my novella, Traumatisms: A Philosophy of Mouth, or A Mathematical Model of Oral Mucosa Wounds. I'm extremely burnt out, and writing a geometrically grotesque novella with just two characters — one of them trypophonic — requires a sharp mind.

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Not to mention, since late last year, I’ve been focused on “academic” work, presenting at conferences, writing a chapter for an academic book (and submitting that chapter), contributing a blog post for Harvard’s Thinking with Plants & Fungi Initiative (publication next month), and drafting an article for a journal dedicated to promoting social-scientific approaches to the study of paranormal experiences, beliefs, and phenomena. In a nutshell, my writing has been focused on two main areas: developing new approaches to writing art history, and examining how vegetal life has been marginalized in accounts of mediumistic practice.

Most of the time I feel insane.

Back to the abacus, an excerpt from chapter six of my novella Traumatisms, titled open systems: a wet circle fucks Cavaillès:

[I +/- (3565)] woke up thinking about sexagesimal number systems and shifted her gaze toward the abacus on her desk. [I +/- (3565)] fantasized about what it would feel like to fuck the structure of the world. [I +/- (3565)] thought about Dogon tradition and the voice of Ama, and the Mesopotamian sky god Anu, associated with the number 60, representing totality and perfection. [I +/- (3565)] traced its rectangular form with double spheroidal precision, utterly disgusted by the idea of framing numbers.

At the moment, I’m sitting in my cramped, shared office at the College. It feels suffocating, damaging in ways I can’t quite articulate. As I reflect on what I’ve written, and on the strange beauty of these interconnected relationships between weaving, mathematics, writing, and art history, I’m reminded of something Iris Moon said during her talk at this year’s Research and Academic Program at the Clark: The text is being written in places you don’t expect…writing happens in your parallel interests.

Yours,

△

One of my long-term research projects focuses on the marginalization of vegetal life in accounts of mediumistic practice, and the tidal wave of botanical life depicted in automatic drawings. Along those lines, this morning, I could write about eco-art history as a new direction for the discipline, or even discuss eco-critical art history and what might be done to “reverse ecocidal behaviors” — that is, the destruction of the natural environment. Instead, I prefer to write about spirits wandering in a garden at Aldwyn Tower in Malvern during a séance conducted on June 22, 1886.

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Most are familiar with the strange status I hold in relation to my own field — disciplinary art history. I've been incredibly vocal about my obliquity to fields in general. To echo Keith Moxey: “Modernist practice is unstable.” The tradition of Western thought has a difficult time accepting holistic thinking. Its reliance on linear, ‘logical’ chronology is incredibly problematic, not to mention its lingering disciplinary habits and preoccupations, assumptions, categorical objectives and taxonomies, concepts and methods.

The field is conscious of its need to develop theories beyond a purely historicist understanding, and I was pleased to hear scholars, curators, and practitioners, convene for lectures and roundtable conversations in this year’s Research and Academic Program (RAP) at The Clark, coming together under the theme, Writing Art History, to think together over four days about the ways in which writing art history is changing.

Although I’ve stayed engaged with critiques of disciplinary art history in recent years, both publishing and presenting at conferences hosted by Modernist Studies in Asia (2023), the Association for Art History (2025), and most recently the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (2025), I haven’t felt fully immersed in the field since August 2022, when I assumed my current role in the Art Department at Williams College. A sort of madness I won’t even begin to entertain here. This year’s RAP at Clark revitalized me in ways I hadn’t felt in quite a while. I felt connected to art history again.

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Despite what I’ve experienced these last few years, I’ve managed to produce what I might consider my most complex writing to date, from writing a geometrically grotesque novella to theorizing on the relationships between mediums, plants, and spirits to writing on art history and its speculative futures. This reminds me of something Iris Moon said recently during an incredibly confessional talk on her writing of Melancholy Wedgwood: “Methodology sometimes emerges from a mess.”

I recently completed a chapter of ‘methodological annihilation’ titled "Beyond Canonical Abstraction: Hilma af Klint’s Spiritual Work as a Call for Methodological Reform" for an edited volume tentatively titled Beyond Hilma af Klint: Rediscovering Swedish Women Modernists. The edited volume will be under further review with Edinburgh UP in the fall. It took me nearly ten years to articulate what I thought I had been saying all along, without ever truly putting it into practice. This isn’t failure; it’s evolution. And this, too, I will turn in on itself. I don’t believe in definitives. Everything exists on a continuum.

It’s certainly not a coincidence that all this writing — especially this call for a new avenue for a more speculative and philosophical art history — happened within my parallel interests in fucking with logic machines, diagrams, geometric methodologies, graph theory, nonlinear matrices of esoterics (nonlinear thought), the diagrammatic to enfold ideas, semiotic gridding, operative relationalities, multiplicity, cosmology, psychophysics, holes, horror, vegetalization in the category of death, the occult relations between humans and plants, consciousness, perception, echo, experimental weaving…

Weaving is about thinking through practices of all kinds. I’m certainly using it interchangeably. That said, I’m pleased to announce I’ll be attending The Newbury School of Weaving this September, paid partly by a generous grant from one of my Guilds: The Hudson-Mowhawk Weavers’ Guild.

Let’s just say my process is topological, open to continuous deformation.

Yours,

▲

This is a virtual-only event, and the Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic area – one of the largest in the salon – will feature 8 sessions over 3 days. These include:

• The Borders of Magic, Diviners, & the Divine

• Occult Arts (my session)

• The Mythic Paranormal

• Demonology, Diabology, & Diabolism

• The Gnosis Must Flower

• Alternative Identities & Alternative Realities

• Daemon ex Machina

If you’re interested, registration is open. You can view the full schedule, including session speakers and paper titles, here: https://swpaca.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2025-Summer-Salon-Program-1.pdf

Despite an upcoming talk and a number of forthcoming publications, my deepest engagement and excitement remain rooted in my weaving practice right now. It's no surprise that I see magic, weaving, literature, mathematics, and sound as deeply interconnected.

Last night, I took part in another weave draft workshop hosted by the Catskill School of Weaving, an artist-run school offering both in-person and online textile classes, with an emphasis on creative skill-building and experiential learning. Weave drafting is the notation that weavers use to create their designs for weaving, consisting of four quadrants: threading, tie-up, treadling, and drawdown. Some people compare it to sheet music for piano. I’m particularly drawn to the somatic and percussive elements of weaving.

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Yet, material considerations aren’t part of the weave draft, which brings me to another exciting workshop I'll be attending in July at the New England Weavers’ Seminar: Transforming Our Tools and Weaving Wonders. The focus of the workshop is to understand the equipment we use, identifying ways for disrupting the fluid order of warp and weft through closely observing loom anatomy in order to achieve unexpected effects in the cloth, transforming the binary grid structure of the conventional weave draft.

About a week after the workshop, I’m headed to upstate New York to attend Shannon Taggart’s Symposium at Lily Dale, a hamlet, connected with the Spiritualist movement, which brings me to parafloral grids and unadulterated chaos.

Above is an 1892 automatic drawing produced by Huldine Beamish, founder of the Edelweiss Society, a Swedish association based on spiritualism and the belief in reincarnation, with an original Christian ideal in mind. Her drawing offers a captivating sensory experience. Amidst the chaotic tangle of dense lines is an arched doorway framed by flowers, an entrance to an unknown realm. Like other similar automatic drawings, it seems to represent pure, unadulterated entanglement, an important property of complex systems.

Her drawing is a web of interconnectedness, a form of collective intelligence, a conscious universe. The omnidirectional nature of the lines symbolize a system, a holistic view of the universe and its unified parts, a living organism, emphasizing interconnectedness. This emerges from the metaphysical background of the world, blurring the boundaries of reality and opening other realms to our senses. As Michael Marder questions in his work on vegetal anachronies: Can a plant haunt? Does it ever return? If so, from where?

Four months overdue, I recently submitted an academic chapter on Hilma af Klint for a forthcoming edited volume on Swedish women modernists, where I engage deeply with the grid structures present in her work. Af Klint’s use of grids and geometric symbols are not merely static systems, but active structures that both embody and produce meaning. The grid serves as a visual representation of relationships between different elements, enabling a dynamic interaction between the components it frames.

This structure embodies the relationships between forms. To Echo Eugenie Brinkema: “Obliquity does not evade the totalization of grid…it submits the possibility that other forms will be co-present with this form, that those forms will mutually affect each other, setting loose speculative possibilities.”[1] Rather than allowing the grid to confine, it opens up the possibility of coexisting forms that influence and interact with one another.

The grid is a site where multiple forms interact and give rise to new possibilities.

The diagrammatic is everywhere.

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[1] Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams, 178.

When I first started writing this post, I thought I might spell - it - out — as in, tell you a story about my recent trip back to the high desert of Northern New Mexico in a straightforward, and honestly fucking boring way.

What I really want to talk about is the desert inside of me. I won’t do that either. At least not yet…

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