Last month when I decided I needed to let a large project sit until January I knew I needed a simple project to work on to keep me sane and to keep me making work. I had been wanting to write a series of haiku for a while and in my mulling about what might make a series I remembered a group of photos I had taken last year that were mutable object collages involving my son’s baby teeth.

(Yes, I kept my son’s baby teeth. I’m not a packrat but it seemed an important thing to do at the time. Perhaps this project is why.)

I winnowed the 30 or so photos down to 17 that seemed to fit together nicely and wrote one or two haiku every day or so over the past month.

But for me a simple project usually involves image, text, and some element of performance that almost always has a musical or sound aspect. At some point in the process I realized that each haiku could be a short song, and that perhaps each song could be a vocal line of a larger piece.

Today I am beginning the music.