The invitation to present work in Posit was as an invitation to celebrate work that owes its beginnings to two collaborations begun remotely in the early days of the pandemic. One with the poet Anna Maria Hong in which we exchanged the raw materials of our work: she, lines of poetry in formation while I offered small images collaged from earlier prints and drawings. The other, with the painter Catherine Howe with whom I corresponded weekly with images responding to a 17th century taxonomy relating color to the natural world.

These dialogues were sustenance in our displacement, the play of text and image allowing us to imagine new possibilities in our work. I am indebted to them for encouraging these works in which I first discovered the potential of vivid chromatic tones to insist on and animate form and shape. These works have become daily meditations, the grounding images for an entirely novel set of paintings and prints that have come to life in my studio.

I call this body of work Nude Palette, a line from the poet Anna Maria Hong, and the title of our collaborative book printed in late 2020. Nude palette—a range of colors stripped bare — seems a perfect signifier for this work in which color is celebrated as essential to the shape it takes.