Have you ever had an epiphany? An epiphany is a sudden, profound realization or insightful moment where the true meaning or essence of something becomes clear, often from a simple occurrence, stemming from the Greek word for "manifestation" or "appearance.”
I’ve had several over the past few weeks.
I wanted to share how I’m going to unfold these publications this year. I will use some of the 800-900 pages of text in these books for my 2028 thesis/dissertation—these writings will drive my dissertation.
“I’m building a psychology of artistic practice that takes mortality seriously as a formative force. And my three books, Glass Bones, Rupture, and In the Shadow of Sun Mountain, act as a trilogy: Theory → Practice → Witness regarding the theories and creativity.”
This is how I see it transpiring:
June 2026: Glass Bones is published.
September 2026: Rupture is published.
November 2026: In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is published.
Allow me to explicate: I'm building a psychology of artistic practice that takes mortality seriously as a formative force—not as metaphor, but as the pressure that shapes how artists see, make, and live. My trilogy examines this from three angles: Glass Bones provides the theoretical framework, drawing on Becker, Rank, and Terror Management Theory to understand death anxiety and cultural defense. Rupture translates theory into practice, exploring the disciplines and orientations that allow artists to transform existential pressure into creative form. In the Shadow of Sun Mountain offers lived witness—thirty years of working with nineteenth-century processes, paint, clay, broken materials, plants, people, and the mountain landscapes as sites where mortality and imagination meet. Together, they map the terrain where awareness becomes art: Theory → Practice → Witness.
This research is situated within liminal space: psychological, material, and cultural thresholds produced by mortality awareness. Rather than resolving death anxiety through symbolic closure, the work asks what becomes possible when creative practice holds the threshold open long enough for transformation to occur.
Mortality awareness places me in a permanently liminal condition. I am alive, but never free of the knowledge that I will not remain so. From a Beckerian perspective, this is not incidental; it is the core destabilizing fact of consciousness. I am an animal capable of symbol-making who cannot fully believe in my own symbols, a being suspended between embodiment and abstraction, presence and disappearance.
I do not experience this condition as episodic or developmental, something to be outgrown or resolved. It is structural. Consciousness itself unfolds at the threshold. What culture often treats as pathology or anxiety to be managed, I understand as the ground from which meaning-making arises. Creative practice, in this sense, is not an escape from liminality but a way of inhabiting it with attention and responsibility, giving form to what cannot be stabilized without distortion.
I will be making new work—photographs, paintings, and mixed media for Glass Bones and Rupture. My work from the mountain will be featured in Sun Mountain.
I think you can wrap your head around that one, right? Just writing this out alleviates some of the “it’s in me, and it has to come out” stuff. To quote John Lee Hooker from Boogie Chillin’ (1948), a natural, internal force that must be expressed.
