Life · Ability · Process
Doublement exceptionnelle
On the Uneven Architecture of a Life
Living with exceptional abilities and significant limitations, and learning to work with the person who actually exists.
Read the essayErin Meares · Writing
Essays
Art, perception, and the making of meaning.
Essays by Erin Meares on art, perception, symbolism and how meaning takes form. A place to follow the relationships between what we make, what we notice and how we understand experience.
Main taxonomy · Twenty forms
A Taxonomy of Things That Shouldn’t Exist
Twenty forms of encounter at the edges of bodies, minds, and worlds.
A functional map of twenty anomalous forms: their mechanisms, conditions, scenarios, and relations within one shared environment.
Read the main taxonomyAddendum · Motive and conation
A Taxonomy of Things That Shouldn’t Exist, Addendum: Motive and Conation for the Incomprehensible
What does the incomprehensible want—and must there be anyone to want it?
Directedness, appetite, pleasure, purpose, and the possibility of wanting without a stable wanter. A companion to the twenty-form taxonomy.
Read the addendumSound · Evidence · Ritual
A Very Good Vibration
Sound, Healing, and the Trouble with Sacred Certainty
Acoustics, attention, tuning, ritual, and the uses of mystery. What sound can do, what the evidence supports, and who gets to say you’re doing it wrong.
Read the essayEmotion · Language · Experience
Emotionally Evocative Terms
Dedicated to Melistrega
A provisional working vocabulary for some of the stranger weather inside us.
Read the essayArt · Perception · Practice
Art as Augury
How a Work of Art Can Answer Back
How boundaries, materials, accidents and attention shape a work of art, and how the work changes the artist’s next move.
Read the essayAbout the writing
Following an idea.
These essays follow connections among art, perception, symbolism and lived experience. They bring larger philosophical questions into contact with particular images, materials, language and encounters.
Written for curious readers, each piece offers a way into the work through an experience or question that can be followed on its own.