Botanical Forms (Untitled)

This is the first line of the Shema: Hear, O Israel: the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One. I have let the words come apart across the page and then connected them with yellow light, a web I read as sefirotic. The Name radiates; the words keep their distance from one another; and the light still travels between them, up and down and across. That is what I understand oneness to be. Echad, אחד, does not mean sameness. It means relationship: separate things bound into one.

I drew אחד as a single fused form: the word for One made one. Below it, a flower glows with the same light it receives and seems to give some back. If God is going to be in the world, the world has to exist, and we have to learn to see it. This piece closes Botanical Forms and opens the fused-letter works: here the light crosses the gaps between the letters; soon the ink will pull them into one shared body. I am still asking how far apart things can be and still be held together before distance turns into isolation.