100 blessings

100 blessings is a count of the small acts of authority a clinician performs in a day — the signatures applied to charts, prescriptions, orders, discharges. The work renders the count as one hundred small panels on a gallery wall, two inches square each, scattered across the surface in irregular distribution. Ninety-two of the panels carry the clinician’s signature — abstracted to its essential gesture, made in black on white and in white on black, the same hand’s mark repeated in slight variation. Eight of the panels carry a small mirror.

The arrangement is not a grid. The panels are placed across the wall in a constellation, with varying densities — some hours of the day sparse, some hours dense, the rhythm of the working day made visible across the wall’s surface. The viewer reads the wall not as inventory but as accumulation: the small habitual gestures of the hand, made hundreds of times, settling into the visual texture of a day’s work.

Some of the day’s acts are vigorously done; most are boringly so. The discipline is in the count. The genuine encounter — the moment when the patient becomes legible as a body, when the gaze returns and the act is seen rather than just done — happens at a small fraction of the total. Eight times in a hundred, on average, the mirror appears.

The work is a self-portrait. Not of the artist’s face, but of the artist’s hand — the hand that has been signing for years, refined into a single fluent gesture, multiplied into the count of a day. The mirrors return whoever stands in front of them. The clinician’s self-portrait therefore includes, by reflection, the bodies of all who have stood in front of her. The signatures are the hand at work; the mirrors are the bodies seen by the work; both are part of the same accumulation, the same day’s labor, the same practice.