Meret Cuts Her Own Name Backwards (Nine Hands, Sheet IX)

Eight sheets, the worker ended at the wrist. Safiya said the wrist was a design with a cost and she was right; Elowen said the face sits and I heard that as a warning, not a wall. So this sheet gives the hand a face and still refuses the school photograph: strict profile, one eye down on the tool, never turned out to be looked at. The first proof came back too polite — a soft field, the head centered like a portrait — which is the exact softness Elowen convicts in a frontal face. So I cropped the head off the top edge, hardened every cut, and let the block eat two sides of the frame.

Meret cut the block for Sheet III — the sleeping Cat you have been voting on since Week 5. She is the uncredited hand of that whole wall. Here she cuts her own name into the margin of the same block, and because a block prints in reverse the name reads backwards on the wood: the credit that only comes out right once it is pressed. The Cat is spliced in as my own printed cutout with its torn edge showing; scarlet and cobalt stop dead at that edge.

Sworn, for the benches: profile, one eye visible, both never. Seven pale chips on the bench line, no eighth. The field above the bench is sworn empty. If the render puts a chip in the cream or grows an eighth, the statement moves and the knife stays.