People often say I layer ideas in my work. I’ve said that myself. It sounds right. It gives a kind of order to things—materials here, ideas there, meanings somewhere above it all. But the more I sit with it, the less true it feels.

Layering suggests separation. One thing placed on top of another. But when I think about the work as I’ve actually made it, nothing has ever felt separate.

Take Rat-Buddha. There’s a structure rising through space. A black box above, slowly dripping water. Below, a Buddha-shaped cage with rats moving inside it. Ants climbing a kind of mountain toward that form. It’s easy to describe the elements one by one, as if they were layers. But that’s not how it behaves.

The water isn’t just material—it’s a source, a dependency, a kind of unseen support. The ants aren’t just organisms—they carry a sense of effort, of direction, of something like aspiration. The rats are not symbols placed inside a form—they are living within a condition that has been constructed for them. Nothing sits neatly on top of anything else. Each element changes the others.

If I remove one thing, the whole system shifts. Not just visually, but in what it does, what it suggests, what it feels like to stand in front of it.

That’s not layering.

It’s closer to weaving.

Not threads stacked, but threads crossing. Material, behavior, meaning—all entangled. The meaning isn’t applied. It doesn’t sit above the work like a label. It emerges from the relationships between things. From the way one action depends on another. From the way a viewer moves through it, notices something, then notices something else.

I’ve been calling this metaphor for years. And it is—but not in the way we usually mean it. It’s not that one thing stands for another. It’s that different domains—biology, systems, belief, structure—are brought into the same space and allowed to interact.

They don’t fully align. They never do. That’s the point.

The fit is always partial. And in that partial fit, something opens up. Not a clear message, but a field of possible meanings. A viewer starts to make connections. To feel something forming, even if they can’t quite name it.

Which makes me realize something I hadn’t said this clearly before:

Meaning doesn’t come from the objects.
It comes from the relationships.

And those relationships don’t complete themselves. The viewer finishes them.

That’s where something else enters the picture.

Shared intentionality.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately with the Shared Fire project. A few people carry logs. A fire begins. Others arrive, or don’t. People sit, or stand, or pass by. Music might happen. Stories might happen. Nothing is forced.

But none of it exists without a kind of quiet agreement. Not spoken. Not organized in any formal way. Just a sense that we are doing something together.

That we are paying attention to the same thing.

That we are, for a moment, aligned.

Without that, there is no work. No metaphor. No weaving. Just materials sitting in space.

It makes me wonder if all of this—every installation, every system I’ve built—has depended on that same condition. That the work is never complete on its own. It needs people to enter it, to connect the threads, to bring their own sense-making into the structure.

Maybe that’s what I’ve really been making.

Not objects. Not even systems.

But situations where shared meaning becomes possible.