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?

The work is not about measurement. It is about the compulsion to measure — the unspoken boundaries around language that we inherit without choosing, the habit of weighing words before they leave us. The poet here is not certain whether this caution is wisdom or constraint. He does not resolve the question. He makes it physical.

The scale is the kind used in any bazaar — for grain, for vegetables, for ordinary things. The red thread is familiar, domestic. And yet together they hold language in suspension, literally and otherwise. Words become cargo. Expression becomes something to be accounted for before it is spent.

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