Confessional Topographies

Creative Writing in Fragmented Form

2022-Ongoing

Confessional Topographies 2021-2022 is a series of written fragments that diaristically dive into the themes of the home, losing, memory, selfhood and acclimatory woes.

They interrogate the extent to which writing in unresolved form can offset losing’s residual pain (Schalansky, J. 2022) and often, they dwell in the ruins of artistic making through my personally obscured written reflections.

Composed in fragmentary verse they were inspired by the two poetic genres of topographical and confessional poetry1 .They recognize from the outset the limitations of language. They are but the beginning of tectonic endings which have initiated my studio-based research which employs the practice of haptic-archaeological drawings to explore the ways in which I may continually ground a sense of myself in the studio.


1 These fragments are building off a deep reading of the genres of confessional and topographical poetry.  For example, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” which ironically describes how it is not always easy to lose things, removing the author’s mask she directly unifies all types of loss and admits to her own unsuccessful attempts to get better at losing things.  In the topographical local poem, In Praise of Limestone, W. H. Auden examines the interrelated existence of humans with nature embedded within the ruins of social and political issues through the allegory of an “inconsistent” limestone pavement, (Barton, D.A., 1977), (Hecht, A. and Auden, W.H., 1979).