The scale of the ocean is baffling—sometimes appearing as a thin horizontal line, sometimes as a vast endless body. When I look at the ocean from the surface, I fixate on how much of it I cannot see, the volume of water underneath the top plane of my own vision. I think about my own subjective, human perspective, and feel the friction from the limit of my own imagination’s capacity for the unknown.

Soft Wait is a gesture towards a different way of knowing a thing. The piece is not only what you look at, but also a thing that holds you while you are looking out. When sitting on or in the piece, viewers are re-oriented into a position of feeling the sculpture while it disappears beneath the body, out of sight—a shift in scale and perspective meant to reference the feeling of looking into the unknown, wading into the water whilst the Navy performs secret sonic experiments nearby or the feeling of walking over the bunker at Race Point in order to reach the vista.

When visiting Fisher’s Island in January, I thought back to one of my earliest memories, a memory that I had not recalled in a long time. I was born in Groton, at the naval hospital, whilst my dad was deployed on a nuclear submarine. I remember being approximately 3 or 4 years old and visiting the base, where a sub was out of the water for repair. We walked up a scaffold so I could touch the softly rounded steel of the boat’s nose dome. I had seen submarines surfacing from afar, seen them riding in partially exposed, but I was shocked at how large they were out of the water. This thing was huge, impossible to see in full from close proximity. When we entered the boat, its world collapsed, so tiny and cramped on the inside that I was overwhelmed with claustrophobia even as a kid.

For the Lighthouse Works Public Commission, I created a porous, interactive monolith with a central inverted dome designed to hold weight and intended as something to sit on. Taking formal cues from the site, the piece is flattened out, made to create another slim line on the horizon that feels more expansive when one is on top of it or up close. This is a place to wait for arrivals and departures, to meet, contemplate, play and enjoy.