The Space Between Us: Why Connection Is the Most Human Thing We Keep Losing
There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not get talked about enough. Not the loneliness of being alone. The loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling the distance.
Modern life has made us extraordinarily good at being near each other without being close to each other. We live in cities of millions and know three of our neighbors. We scroll through hundreds of faces every day and feel seen by almost none of them. We are more connected, by every measurable metric, than any generation that came before us. And somehow the space between us keeps growing.
I have moved around most of my life. From England to California, away from the people who knew me before I became who I am now. My family is on the other side of the world. The friends I grew up with are in time zones that make a phone call a logistical exercise. The distance is real and it does not get easier to hold.
What I did not expect was where I would find the people who feel closest to me now.
I have friends I have never met in person. People I would call honorary brothers and sisters without hesitation. People who know what I am working on, what I am afraid of, what I find funny at midnight. We met online, in the strange pockets of the internet where people who feel things deeply tend to gather, and what happened between us is not a lesser version of friendship. It is just friendship, in the shape that the modern world made available.
I think about connection a lot. What it actually is, underneath the word. It is not proximity. You can sit next to someone every day for years and never feel it. It is not frequency either. It is something more like recognition. The moment when another person sees the same thing you see, or values what you value, or holds the same quiet question about existence that you have been holding alone.
That moment does not require geography. But it does require something to pass between you. Something tangible. Something that says: I thought of you and I made this.
That is what the Wormhole Project is.
102 miniature canvases. Each one 4x4 inches. Each one a miniature slice of the universe. And running through every single one of them, connecting all 102, a single wormhole. One continuous line of light and space and cosmic matter that does not care how far apart the pieces end up.
I made this series for anyone who has ever felt the distance. Anyone who has people they love in places they cannot easily reach. Anyone who has sat with the knowledge that the people who understand them best are not in the same room, and maybe never have been.
The pieces are numbered. When you buy more than one, they go out in sequence. You can keep them together or you can give them away. You can send one to your person in another country and keep one on your wall and know that the same wormhole runs through both of them. That the line connecting them is not metaphorical. It is painted there, in the same hand, on the same day, as part of the same act of making.
Distance is a physical fact. Connection is a choice we make inside it.
I have a brother in another city I have never stood next to. I have a sister I met through a screen who knows my work better than people who have watched me make it in person. The space between us is real. But so is what runs through it.
