I did not choose duality. I noticed it.
Long before I had language for it, I noticed that nothing I found interesting ever sat on one side only. The saint and the tyrant prayed to the same god. The mask that protects also unsettles. The most devastating grief and the most luminous devotion wear, at times, the exact same face. I have never been able to look at good without feeling the outline of evil right behind it, or at beauty without sensing what it costs, or is asked to hide.
I know now that this is not only a question about the world. It is a description of myself. What organizes me is not a conflict between strength and weakness, but something more specific: a desire for a freedom so complete it answers to no one, standing right next to a need for an encounter of exceptional depth — one deep enough to be worth staying for. I have never wanted to resolve that into one thing. I am not sure it can be resolved, and I have stopped believing it should be.
Jung had a word for what happens when a tension like this refuses to go away, and refuses to be solved by thinking harder about it: individuation — not fixing the contradiction, but giving it a symbol solid enough to live in. The symbol does not explain the tension. It holds it, the way a keystone holds two opposing forces without either one winning. That, I think, is the most honest description of what I do. I am not resolving anything when I build a piece. I am building the one place where both truths get to stay true at once.
This is why a reliquary interests me more than a jewel ever could. A reliquary is, before anything else, a guardian: a shell built to protect something it refuses to fully expose. I did not choose that form by accident. I have spent my life being one — sovereign, self-contained, unwilling to let anyone in who would ask me to trade that sovereignty for closeness.
And underneath all of it sits a single demand I recognize as my own: not “admire me,” but “don’t reduce me — meet me.” I feel this most when I think about how enchanted I remain by life itself — by how much it holds, how rarely it agrees to follow one rule, how many worlds a single person is asked to carry without ever being allowed to pick just one. That enchantment refuses a clean visual language. It wants abundance: a Catholic Madonna standing next to a West African mask without either one apologizing for the other, Orthodox gold beside Baroque excess beside an Orientalist dream. None of these, alone, is allowed to say what the work means, because no single tradition has ever been enough to say what I mean either.
The materials follow the same law. I have never worked in anything the world already agrees is precious, because a precious material has already answered the question before the work had the chance to ask it. Brass, glass, paper: worth nothing on their own. That is the condition I need. The value was never supposed to be in the material. It is something I insist on building, every time, out of what the world had already decided was worthless.
So — is this a kind of therapy for the soul? I want to be careful with that word, because therapy suggests a wound waiting to close. I do not think this tension is a wound. I think it is a structure I was built with — the way a cathedral stands because its buttresses pull against each other, and would collapse the moment either one won. The work does not resolve that pull. It gives it a place to stand: in gold that is not gold, in a language borrowed from everywhere and owned by no one tradition, in a body willing to carry two truths at once without asking either one to leave. If that is therapy, it is not the kind that cures. It is the kind that lets you go on living, at full intensity, inside a contradiction you were never going to be rid of — and were probably never meant to be.