White on White

Material, Memory, and the Absence That Holds

Chapter 1: What Remains When Color Leaves

When did I last see something truly white?
Not painted white, not printed white, not the blank screen of a phone or the glare of a gallery wall.
But a white that breathes. A white that moves. A white that holds more than it shows.

I think of the moon.

The moon is not white. And yet it is the image we most associate with whiteness. It pulls at us from above, eroded and pitted, wrapped in darkness, and still—still we call it pure. But its whiteness is not pigment. It is behavior. It reflects. It glows. It disappears. The moon is not white—it makes white possible.

To look at it is to look at a condition. Light falling. Shadow collecting. Surface remembering. That is whiteness.

The Rarity of True White

White surrounds us—walls, paper, packaging, screens—but very little of it is truly white. Most of it is engineered. Tinted. Polished. Bleached to meet a standard of cleanliness or neutrality. But when you begin to look closely, to really study materials as a maker, you realize how rare true white is. Not symbolic white. Not artificial white. But white as it emerges, in nature, in fiber, in mineral—white as something that has not been told what to mean.

Snow is white—but only at first. It reflects light because of the way its crystals scatter it, but it carries a bluish memory, a shadow. It melts. It darkens. It disappears. Salt is white when dry, but glistens under moisture. Bone can be white, until it ages and reveals the time it has held. Milk is white—but only for a moment, before it sours or is exposed to air. Even clouds—our great metaphor for softness—are white only when seen from a distance. Up close, they are vapor. Light. Temperature. Movement.

We think we know white because it appears so often in our built world. But most of that whiteness is synthetic. Flat. Controlled. The matte coat of a wall, the calibrated hue of a product, the forced blankness of a digital interface. These whites do not react. They do not shift when the light changes. They do not absorb time. They only perform consistency.

But true white—natural white—is alive.
It stains. It breathes. It disappears in shadow. It flares in sunlight. It can be warm or cold, rough or glistening. It is never still.

White is not a background. It is a phase. A condition. A behavior.

To work with white is to return to recognizing materials in their sensitive, transitional state.
It is a way of honoring the precision of the eye, the pressure of the hand, and the subtlety of surfaces that resist attention.

To work with white is to work without distraction.
To learn how something becomes visible not by contrast, but by care.

Paper as White Skin

If white exists anywhere in its most sensitive form, it is in paper. But not all paper. Not the factory-finished, bleached, glossy white of mass production. Real white paper—alive paper—is made. It is cast, pulled, formed. It is a sheet only after it has been fiber, water, tension, breath. And when it is white, it does not behave like a surface. It behaves like skin.

Skin is not passive. It responds. It marks. It holds. It remembers pressure, absorbs time, and shows evidence. This is how I understand paper—not as a support for an image, but as a body in waiting.

White paper is not empty. It is suspended. It is the space before decision, but also the space where gestures remain. A fold is not decorative. A stitch is not illustrative. A tear is not an accident. These are actions that become part of the material’s new anatomy. And in white, these actions are heightened, because there is nothing else to distract from them.

White paper reflects every touch. It cannot hide your hesitation. It will show you where you pressed too hard, where your thread pulled, where the pulp dried faster than you expected. It forces you into clarity of action. That clarity is not about control. It is about honesty.

In my work, I do not use paper to hold content. I use it to record contact. Not as metaphor, but as fact. I pierce it, stitch it, cast it, layer it—not to tell a story, but to leave behind a map of what happened. The paper does not illustrate the work. It is the work.

And white? White makes all of it visible—but never obvious.

Working Through White

To work with white is not to simplify. It is to strip away everything that can be borrowed—color, symbol, illusion—and ask what remains. What does the material do? What does it hold? What does it refuse to hide?

White on white is often mistaken for minimalism. But it is not minimal. It is exacting. It demands a heightened sense of perception—because nothing is offered up for free. There is no focal point. No trick of contrast. The work is not declared. It must be discovered.

In white, even the smallest gesture speaks loudly. A line of pierced holes. A single fold. A casting that lifts one surface into another. A stitch that pulls too tight. Each act becomes a site. A decision. A structure. And because everything shares the same color, the only thing left to perceive is relation—between light and surface, between edge and volume, between gesture and shadow.

This is not working in white. It is working through it.

In my practice, white is not a background. It is the condition under which all decisions must be made. It sharpens time. It amplifies rhythm. It does not allow distraction. And so, to work through white is to trust that form will emerge not through image, but through presence.

It’s not about what white hides.
It’s about what it makes possible—when you’re willing to stay long enough to see it.

Self-Topography in White

There is no need to depict the body when the body already leaves marks. A fold remembers weight. A stitch remembers rhythm. A casting remembers pressure. These are not metaphors for the self—they are coordinates. White, in this sense, becomes a topographic field: a terrain of labor, repetition, and quiet insistence.

I don’t work with identity through image. I work with identity as evidence. As imprint. As ritual. A map that has no borders, only repetitions. The self does not appear as a portrait. It appears as a scar, a seam, a slightly raised surface that catches the light in one direction and vanishes in another.

White is not neutral here. It is exacting. It does not allow sentiment. It asks only: what remains? What holds? What breaks when repeated?

In this way, my work becomes a kind of self-documentation. Not narrative. Not confession. A map made from acts of making: piercing, folding, stitching, soaking, layering, waiting. A topography built not from landmarks, but from labor. The gesture is never symbolic. It is specific.

White does not tolerate vagueness. It either shows what was done—or shows nothing.
And that honesty is where the self begins to appear.

What White Teaches Us

White is not absence. It is not purity. It is not silence.
White is a way of showing that something happened—without explaining it.
It is a condition that requires sensitivity, attention, and restraint.
It refuses distraction, and in return, it sharpens perception.

To work in white on white is to say:
I will not rely on color. I will not hide behind image.
I will let the material speak, if only in a whisper.

The moon taught me that.
And paper continues to.

We do not need color to speak.
We need attention.
We need presence.
We need a surface honest enough to hold what we touch—and still not shout.

That is what white offers us.
Not emptiness,
but everything held, quietly.

Chapter 2: The Moon Is Not White

A surface of memory, a mirror of self, a teacher of rhythm

The moon is not white.
It only seems white because it has no light of its own. It reflects. It receives. It gathers what it’s given—sunlight, shadow, our gaze—and sends it back, softened. Changed. Scarred. Still glowing.

This is not metaphor. This is material truth.
And yet, to me, the moon is also everything I try to hold in my hands when I make a piece in white: something distant, textured, quiet, damaged, and glowing.

I have never made work about the moon. But I have made work with it. It is always there. Beneath the surfaces I fold, beneath the paper I pierce, beneath the white pulp I press into terrain. The moon teaches me about white—not the idea of white, but the behavior of white. It shows me how something can be both close and unreachable. How it can be read as pure, even when it holds every scar from every impact it has ever absorbed.

When I cast the surface of the moon in paper, I am not illustrating it. I am tracing its memory. Its craters become topography. Its silence becomes volume. Its absence becomes a form.

I think often about how the moon never heals. Every mark stays. Every contact becomes part of the structure. Nothing is erased. And that is how I think about my work in white. Nothing is decorative. Nothing disappears. Every cut, every stitch, every pressed fiber is recorded. Not dramatically. Just honestly.

People call the moon a symbol. But I don’t see it that way. I see it as a material reality. A body floating alone, collecting time. A mirror. A map. A witness.

When I say that white is not empty, I am thinking of the moon.
When I say that a surface holds presence, I am thinking of the moon.
When I make work without color, without narrative, without image, I am making a space where the same kind of whiteness can occur—a whiteness that does not show itself, but waits to be noticed.

The moon is not white.
But it has taught me everything I know about what white can do.

Chapter 3: Materials That Are (Almost) White

On sourcing, sensing, and trusting whiteness

White is a promise materials rarely keep. Most things that appear white at first—once you begin to work with them—reveal something else entirely: warmth, tint, residue, instability. As artists, makers, and sensers of material, we learn that true whiteness is not about the absence of color, but about the presence of responsiveness.

White, when real, does not stay still.

Think of cotton—raw, wild, almost cloud-like. Its whiteness comes with a tinge of life, of the field. It carries weather, insects, sun. Once processed, bleached, dried, it becomes flatter—but also more ghostlike. Then there is abaca, flax, and kozo—fibers that can be made white through boiling and beating, but never behave the same way twice. Their color shifts with time, with water, with light. Their whiteness is earned through labor. And still, it changes.

Porcelain promises a kind of white that’s closer to bone than to snow. Cold, mineral, dense, radiant from within. Salt, on the other hand, offers a crystalline white that sharpens under light—but it absorbs moisture, stains with skin, collapses in heat. It has memory, but no loyalty.

There is plaster, chalk, gesso—each with their own kind of silence. Plaster is fast and unforgiving. Chalk is soft, easily bruised. Gesso is a sealed surface pretending to wait—but resistant to touch. Wax is the most deceptive. It glows white from inside, but once handled, it records fingerprints, warmth, air. It is always in-between.

And then, there is paper.

Paper, when handmade from real fiber, pulled with care, and dried naturally, is perhaps the most sensitive of all whites. Its whiteness is not just visual—it is structural. The fibers hold light without shining. They reflect gesture without exaggerating it. Paper does not perform. It simply reveals.

In my practice, I do not look for ideal whites. I work with the ones that behave with honesty. I trust materials that shift. I trust whites that are not “pure,” but responsive.

Because whiteness, in its truest form, is a field of change.
It carries what it touches.
It reveals what touches it.
It does not hold still.
And that is precisely what makes it worth working with.

Chapter 4: White as Labor

Folding, piercing, stitching, casting—whiteness as a site of effort

To work in white is to take away all distractions. Nothing can hide. Nothing can rely on symbol. What remains is labor—bare, precise, repetitive, exposed.

White on white reveals process.
It reveals your hand.
And it reveals your decisions—especially the quiet ones.

There is a misconception that white is “pure” or “minimal.” But for those of us who work through it, white is a kind of resistance. It does not give anything away. It does not celebrate gestures. It demands repetition. It demands attention. And it amplifies every mistake, every overreach, every hesitation.

This is why I fold. Why I pierce. Why I stitch. Why I cast.
Because these are not aesthetic choices. They are ways of working that allow white to show its depth without ever having to shout.

A fold is not a line—it’s pressure suspended.
A pierced surface is not damaged—it’s opened.
A stitch is not ornamental—it is a mark of effort, a scar of continuity.
A cast form is not a reproduction—it is a surface that carries the memory of another.

And when done in white, these actions speak more clearly than color ever could.

White exposes time.
A hundred stitches in white thread on white paper say nothing and everything at once.
They show the hour. They show the hand. They show the willingness to repeat.

I do not work in white to simplify. I work in white to pay attention.
To let the labor appear without decoration.
To let the surface become an archive of effort, a map of insistence.

This is not about reducing expression.
This is about placing trust in material, and asking:
Can the act itself hold meaning, if nothing is added to it?

In white, the answer is yes.
But only if the work is real.
Only if the labor shows.

Chapter 5: Self-Topography

Mapping identity through repetition, absence, and the tactile trace

There are no portraits in my work.
No faces. No outlines of a body. No narrative to follow.
And still, the work is entirely personal.

I do not depict the self. I trace it—through repetition, gesture, decision, hesitation. The self is not a symbol. It is a surface that changes over time. And white is where that surface becomes legible.

To me, white is not neutral. It is not blank.
It is a mirror—but not one that shows you what you look like.
It shows you what you do.
How you return to the same action. How you handle pressure. How you navigate silence.

I often say my work is a map—but it is not a map of a place.
It is a topography of doing.
It records where I pressed. Where I pulled. Where I tore and stitched again.
Every mark is a decision, but none of it is expressive. It is documentary.
It is what remains when I let the material tell the truth.

When I fold a sheet of paper hundreds of times, I am not trying to illustrate anything. I am trying to stay. To remain. To be present in the act, and let the act become the form.
When I pierce the same pattern into the skin of a sheet, over and over again, I am creating rhythm, yes—but also pulse. A way to measure time without a clock.

This is why white is essential.
Because in color, gesture can hide behind drama.
In image, meaning can be performed.
But in white—everything is exposed. The body is there, but only as a trace. A series of events. A system of return.

This is not biography.
This is topography.
Self, as surface.
Presence, as pressure.

And paper—like skin—remembers.

Chapter 6: Stillness That Holds

A closing without conclusion

White is not silence.
It is not absence.
It is what holds everything without speaking for it.

I’ve spent years working with white, not to chase purity, but to sit with tension. To see what remains when color leaves. To trust that material, if treated with care and pressure, can speak without saying anything at all.

White does not perform. It responds.

It catches light. It marks time. It reveals process. And most of all, it waits—for the viewer to adjust their eyes, for the hand to steady, for the gesture to become real.

The stillness in white is not a void. It is suspension. It is form that hasn’t asked to be looked at—only touched, folded, layered, stitched, soaked, lifted.

We do not need to fill it.
We do not need to explain it.

We need to stay in it.

Letting stillness hold us.
Letting pressure speak.
Letting presence rise, without decoration.

This is how I understand white on white:
As a system of care.
A space of return.
A field where surface and self reflect one another,
and everything is allowed to remain—just as it is.