Eat This Scroll (for breakfast) is a video work I made on January 4, 2026.
The work unfolds through a simple sequence of actions: written words are crumpled, tossed toward a pail, burned to ash, mixed with water, eaten, and then used as a drawing medium. The meaning and medium are filtered and consumed, back into the means of mark-making.
The title references the prophet Ezekiel, who is commanded to eat a scroll—to take difficult words into the body rather than keep them at a distance. Ingestion is not symbolic but embodied. Language is consumed, wrung-out, and reduced to burnt pulp. Meaning passes through fire, digestion, regurgitation, and accepted reuse.
Words are contingent, shaped by who speaks them, how they are used, and the power they serve. Repeated often enough, they become profaned—emptied, inverted, or made to signify the opposite of what they once promised. In this work, language is not clarified or redeemed, but broken down.
This work emerges from a period of exhaustion and repetition. Public life has felt increasingly corrosive—marked by decisions that must be endured even as they are resisted. Some days call for refusal, protest. Some days call for rest. Others – movement, and joy. Sometimes, there is no clarity on what to do. There is nothing to do, but sit in the absurdity of it all.
Maybe I’m just trying to find acceptance in it all, as a way to survive. Ash becomes nourishment. Waste becomes medium. These gestures are not meant to be redemptive, nor despairing, but ongoing—a way of staying present when hope feels difficult to practice, yet impossible to abandon.
