ax o ax

This work began with a phrase - ambiguous, unstable, and resistant: “No only but also not actually.” Appearing without announcement on the weathered wall of a quiet industrial building, the words offered no clear meaning, only a suggestion - a disruption. For one week they stood exposed to the world, visible yet unresolved, before being abruptly and inexplicably erased under a veil of whitewash. And yet, even in absence, they remained. A ghost-image lingered, fading slowly into brick and weather, becoming part of the wall, part of the street, part of the city’s unnoticed skin.

This piece is a meditation on impermanence, contradiction, and the instability of meaning. Language appears, asserts itself, then vanishes - but never entirely. What we try to erase leaves traces; what we think is gone becomes memory, shadow, texture. The work asks viewers to consider how interpretation forms in the space between presence and absence, and how time reclaims all that we try to fix in place.

In a world driven by clarity and permanence, “No only but also not actually” resists both. It is a phrase with no anchor and no home, an open loop in the viewer’s understanding. The work lives in that uncertainty — and in the quiet erosion of all things certain.