The Practice of Making Forms
What can a form carry?
I make forms for things that are difficult to keep: memory, grief, testimony, relation, collective experience, and traces of a gathering. A form cannot preserve an experience intact, but it can give that experience somewhere to move.
writing + art · october 2026
what we hold
and what we carry
fall jeongman junction art and zen retreat
ann arbor zen buddhist temple
ann arbor, michigan · october 2026
poets + artists: allison, maum, nachimpan, pasadi, samda, papung
flower sketches — pasadi
maps — allison, maum, pasadi
workshop facilitation, broadside + zine design — pasu (Meadow Jones)
Artifacts + exhibitions
Forms that hold, carry, and continue an encounter.
Book arts and handmade forms
A stack of handmade journals makes the material question visible: what does paper hold, and what changes when writing, image, binding, and the hand belong to the same object? These forms recur in teaching, scholarship, and collective publication.
Emergence & Pandora’s Dress
Emergence moves between film and still image; one frame became the cover of Sensoria: A Journal of Mind, Brain and Culture, Vol. 11 No. 1 (2015). Pandora’s Dress brings clothing, gender, looking, and performance into the same field. Both works appear in the archive of the body and its representation.
narcolepsy
An animated work in which birds and the body meet. Its imagery returns as a visual thread in later work about memory, embodiment, and home.
House and Home / The Work We Do While Doing Our Work
House and Home (2012) asked participants to bring or make things that felt like home: rooms, objects, clothing, photographs, and attachments. In The Work We Do While Doing Our Work (2018), rope, books, and an occupied house became part of the work of gathering. The photograph here documents the 2018 exhibition; photograph by Boyd Porter Reynolds.
Coming Home
The 2024 Self-Care Writing workshops at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center led to poems, prints, drawings, body maps, a collected book, and a public exhibition and reading. The work attends to bodies and buildings, welcome and exclusion, and the different places people locate home.
Where Is Home? — Mapping Safety, Connection, and Belonging
Created for the 2026 Housing Matters Conference, the exhibition brought work from House and Home (2012), The Work We Do While Doing Our Work (2018), Coming Home / Self-Care Writing (2024), and Homecoming (2026) into relation. It asked where home happens through objects, bodies, rooms, writing, and other people. Participant work was credited to its makers and shown with permission.
Remaking Democracy: How We Make the Worlds We Want
At the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center on April 12, 2026, I was a featured artist and reader at the Urbana book launch for Danielle Chynoweth and Elizabeth Adams’s Remaking Democracy. The event brought a book talk, discussion, concert, exhibition, and performance together in celebration of 35 years of the School for Designing a Society.
Archives + earlier forms
Earlier forms remain in circulation.
Writing with Video archives
Course sites documenting long-running experiments in authorship, video, narrative, visual culture, and pedagogy.
The Gaze and related teaching archives
Digital remnants of courses and projects on feminist art, activism, surveillance, looking, and visual culture.
The Teaching Botanist
An older pedagogical archive that preserves another strand of the teaching practice rather than being erased by the current professional narrative.
Writing + publications
Writing is also a made form.
Archiving the Trauma Diaspora
Dissertation, University of Illinois repository · 2019 article, Marilyn Zurmuehlen Working Papers in Art Education.
Paper as Praxis
With Steven Kostell, in The Art and Art Therapy of Papermaking. Publisher record.
Bringing Back the Bears: An Unreliable Bestiary in an Unimaginable Time
Art feature in Ninth Letter, 14(1).
The Poster Children Want Us to Save the World / Anterior Discectomy
The Poster Children Want Us to Save the World, art feature in Ninth Letter, 13(2). “Anterior Discectomy,” in When Language Runs Dry: An Anthology, Mend My Dress Press (2017).
The Able-ist Gaze / To Write What You Know
“The Able-ist Gaze: Imagining Malingering,” The Feminist Wire (2013). “To Write What You Know: Embodiment, Authorship and Empathy,” Sensoria 10(1), 49–56 (2014).
Selected poetry
In We’ve Been Put Through Fire & Come Out Divine: Stories of Hope & Survival (2024) and We’ve Got Some Things to Say: Reshaping Narratives Around Sexual Violence (2025), AWA Press.
Unless otherwise credited, artwork, writing, images, and documentation on this site are © Meadow Jones. Documentation photographs remain credited to their photographers. Please do not reproduce, download, or reuse this work without permission.