I designed this piece when I was invited by poet Ari Satok to be a part of his Poetry Art Prints project, to support charities doing meaningful work to help those most affected by COVID-19.

He sent me a few of his poems and invited me to make a piece of artwork featuring a snippet of text. This text spoke to me immediately:

Maybe for now it’s best to remember
That incomplete things
Can be beautiful, too.

When I read it, I thought of the biblical command to not harvest the corners of your field but to leave the corners for the stranger, the disenfranchised, the poor (Leviticus 19:9 and 23:22). A not-completely-harvested field is an incomplete and yet beautiful thing, because the corners have been left for those who need. In this piece, I’ve paired the text with both cut and uncut stalks of wheat to represent that incompletely-harvested field. I also designed the partially-cut wheat stalks in a pattern that remind me of the exponential bar graphs I’ve been seeing about the growth of pandemic infections.

On this page, you can see the original papercut. Prints of this piece, through the project, are available here.