“Witness to the Trace,” The artwork is a whole-plate (6.5” x 8.5”) tintype.
I made this portrait of a friend and fellow doctoral student as a way of staying with something we’re both circling in our work. The skull isn’t a prop so much as a confrontation. An ordinary object that carries the fact we spend most of our lives softening. In his hands, it becomes a point of contact rather than distance. What the image holds is that brief threshold where awareness sharpens and doesn’t immediately turn away, where the human effort to make meaning and the certainty of its limit sit side by side, without resolution.
Las Cruces, New Mexico, March 28, 2026, copyright Quinn Jacobson