Carpentry guidebooks teach you how to man-handle with a firm grip. Deconstructing the didactic language and instructional images of the construction manual, my work adjusts their intended function, inverts their authority, and queers their use.

“Rough work, soft touch” is a schematic drawing, looping between the manual’s diction and my contradiction. Establishing the body as both the site of construction and the tool, I explore what it means to dance in the trace while embodying a different fullness.

The correctness and precision associated with woodworking, printmaking, and gender performance become a rigid surface to sand away, reveal, and omit through approximation and splintering.

Bodies on the edge of rubbing up against something. A sense of momentum, motion, and a heavy kind of groundlessness with a trans-masculine slant. These silhouettes become surrogate bodies.

I ask you to act alongside me—copy me copying him; along the way the referent runs out, and the fractured body deconstructs the absolute value of the original.