Pain.
Pain the author.
Pain the teacher.
I accept it.
I reject it.
I learn from it.
I renounce it.
I feel it.
I am numb.
I sit be·twixt the pendulum. Watching the great arc of each swing.
I observe pain.
I am observed.
A reading of the piece (AI-generated, interpretive): A hollowed, folded mass of worked clay becomes a meditation on suffering as both wound and instructor—its dark recesses suggesting the psyche's inner cavities where pain is held, resisted, and witnessed. The oscillation the artist describes, between acceptance and rejection, feeling and numbness, finds form in the sculpture's contrasting planes of exposed shadow and smoothed, worked surface.