Since feeling is first (2024 – ongoing), my fourth major project cycle as I expand my study of group sizes, is a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. Exploring the ways in which personal emotion and individual experience comes to inform the legal and political structures that shape our society, Since feeling is first consists of several intertwined works that explore how private feelings and experiences manifest into codified political, legal and social systems. Through this research-based project, I aim to look closely at the ways in which emotion conditions legal environments as social spaces that inform collective experience, as a means of engaging with structures that feel inevitable, obvious, or like unavoidable conclusions of normative power, thereby opening up other ways of seeing how law shapes our lives.

Despite being positioned as objective, unemotive, and socially determined, we can see that law and politics forms first from emotional tenors and belief: feelings of vulnerability drive anti-immigration laws, police are forgiven for murder with the simple statement, “I felt unsafe,” or, most recently, Roe v. Wade was overturned with an explicit reference to feeling. Justice Alito’s statement reads: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views. Some believe fervently that a human person comes into being at conception and that abortion ends an innocent life. Others feel just as strongly that any regulation of abortion invades a woman’s right to control her own body and prevents women from achieving full equality. Still others in a third group think that abortion should be allowed under some but not all circumstances, and those within this group hold a variety of views about the particular restrictions that should be imposed.” (Emphases mine.) In his majority opinion, Alito presents that legal concern is a “moral issue” that moves from belief, to feeling, to thinking, ordering them with the disempowered/minority position being related to a “feeling.” In this landmark decision, emotion is both introduced into legal precedent, and dismissed.

My artistic work moves outward from individual experience to understand how these personal emotions accrue into a shared tone of how we see, read, interpret and relate – a “general feeling” that can’t be generalized. That state of general feeling determines how we write about and create in the present and towards the future, which in turn determines how we consider our shared history. I use an attention to intimacy and the everyday in order to represent a shared emotional state of combined exhaustion and enragement — the tension between engagement and defeat. By paying attention to these feelings, and how they in turn become structures that condition shared experience, I aim to open a space of learning, of attunement to one’s presence, and of resistance within defeat.

The work’s title, Since feeling is first, is drawn from ee cummings’ poem with the same title. cummings posits that feelings, rather than language, are the conduit for a full lived experience. For me, this poem exists in permanent partnership with Frank O’Hara’s “For Grace, After A Party,” which begins with the line, “You do not always know what I am feeling.” This is the gap I am attempting to bridge: acknowledging that feelings are primary in all things while simultaneously addressing that they are not always fully known. I believe that the acceptance of this combined reality may offer us deep forms of knowledge that serve as forms of resistance and the foundation for deep social change.

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