The project begins with generating questions. I spend time writing as many compelling, challenging, and provocative questions as I can. Some direct my attention toward things I value. Others challenge my assumptions, expose contradictions, or ask me to confront things I might prefer not to know.

From these, I select the questions that seem most alive: the ones that stay with me, unsettle me, or make me genuinely curious about their answers.

I then create hand-drawn words and fragments and arrange them into question collages. Along with the words, I incorporate scraps of paper covered with drawn marks and textures. The resulting collages look, to me, something like the way a question feels as it arises in the mind. I photograph each composition before taking it apart so its individual elements can be used again.

The finished question collages are placed throughout my environment where I will encounter them unexpectedly and repeatedly. Whenever I encounter one, I answer it, sometimes in my mind, sometimes out loud, sometimes in writing. I am less interested in finding definitive answers than in discovering what happens when a compelling question follows me through my life.

Each encounter disrupts my normal thought process.

By taking questions out of the mind and placing them into the physical world, they become harder to ignore. Drawing gives thought a physical presence. Question Encounters is an ongoing experiment to see if and how our habitual patterns of thought might be altered by encountering questions in the wild.

The question becomes an object.

A disruption.

Something to live with.

A catalyst for change and possibly… evolution.