Why Marginalia

This space exists to hold material that is important but unresolved.

Marginalia Notes is a working archive of research, visual fragments, and provisional thinking developed alongside my broader practice in folklore, natural history, and symbolic systems. Rather than presenting resolved ideas or completed interpretations, it gathers the peripheral material that accumulates during reading, drawing, and making: annotations, partial connections, recurring forms, and questions that appear during the art process.

Historically, marginalia has functioned as a site of testing rather than declaration. Notes written in the margins of manuscripts ,by scholars, copyists, and readers, recorded uncertainty, disagreement, correction, and association. They preserved thought in motion. In scientific and natural history contexts, field notes served a similar role: provisional records intended to be revised, re-organized, or superseded as understanding evolved. This archive draws from both traditions.

The posts collected here will take two primary forms. Most appear as short notes: image-led entries, fragments, or research annotations that document process without resolving meaning. Occasionally, field essays outline historical or methodological context relevant to the systems I am working within ,classification, folklore theory, symbolism, and the transmission of belief. These essays are not interpretations of specific artworks, but reference points that frame the intellectual terrain the work moves through.

This is not a catalogue, and it is not intended to explain completed pieces. The artwork itself, whether as installation, image, or publication, remains the site where synthesis occurs. Marginalia Notes operates adjacent to that work, recording the structures and materials that precede it rather than the conclusions that follow.

What appears here is deliberately partial. Some ideas will recur in altered forms; others will be abandoned or absorbed elsewhere. Accumulation is not treated as progress, and silence between entries is expected. The aim is not documentation for its own sake, but a record of attention: how certain images, systems, and questions persist over time.

The work itself happens elsewhere.This is the margin it grows from.