Looking for weight in the words

Urdu letterforms — cut from wood, painted black — hang suspended from a market weighing scale by red thread. The scale registers their mass. The question the work poses is both literal and impossible: how much does a word weigh?

But the work is not really about measurement. It is about the act of measuring — about why we feel compelled to weigh our words before they leave us. Who decided that some things should be said and others shouldn’t? Are these boundaries we chose for ourselves, or ones that were quietly handed to us by the people and places we grew up in? The poet here is not making a statement. He is asking a question he cannot answer: why do I need to be this careful?

The red thread — the kind you find in any bazaar, ordinary and familiar — ties language to something domestic and everyday. The weighing scale is not a precision instrument; it is the kind used to sell vegetables or grain. And yet here it holds words. Language becomes cargo. Meaning becomes something to be measured before it is spent. The work sits with that condition — not to resolve it, but to make it visible.

Looking for weight in the words | Acrylics on wood, weight machine, thread | 60 x 28 inches | 2018