It struck me at some point that the things I wanted to say had to be wordless. I had to renounce words in order to go deep into the practice of making materials and textures that would express what I'm trying to say more accurately.

It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating.

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. And something I always find beautiful about Jesse's work is that he finds beauty without any calculation. People say that his work is dark, but he never sees it as such. For him it's all almost about educating people to process why they feel disgust.

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. There's often two words that are close in meaning, yet what I'm trying to say is in between them, or it might be a little more layered and nuanced. Having this conversation with you is exciting, because I can feel you resonate, even though we're on the phone. That's really beautiful to me.

When you actually make a new friend, and you make music and laugh really hard together, that can give you a lot of confidence and nourishment and encouragement.

It struck me at some point that the things I wanted to say had to be wordless. I had to renounce words in order to go deep into the practice of making materials and textures that would express what I'm trying to say more accurately.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.