Statement

At first, the carved surfaces register as texture. Lines of incisions gather into dense, restless fields against white. As viewers move closer, the marks become language. Each phrase begins with “May you” or “May your,” addressing the viewer directly and inviting them to slow down and read.

Misspellings, repeated prayers and occasional slips of the chisel remain visible. These irregularities record the physical act of carving and the hand's fallibility, allowing uncertainty to enter both the language and its material form.

With the exhibition title May I have nothing., the language of the carvings turns inward. While each prayer addresses an imagined “you,” the title becomes a private petition—an appeal for release from possession, certainty and expectation. “Nothing” is not presented as absence, but as a space in which attention, humility and possibility can remain.

The prayers move freely between tenderness, disruption, the body and the natural world. “May the animals thrive” sits within the same evolving vocabulary as “May you ruin the hierarchy,” “May you hurl rocks at the meaning” and “May subtle harmonies fill your bones.”

They resemble blessings, but they do not prescribe a belief system. Their tone can be generous, unruly, humorous or unsettling. Together, they form an open-ended language of hope without certainty.

Behind these carved blocks is a much larger body of writing. I have written thousands of prayers for the series and maintain an edited working vocabulary of roughly 500. Although carving slowed for a period, the writing continued. The archive of prayers kept growing even when the physical objects did not.

In summer 2026, I returned to carving. I build each block in my garage, then carve it in the shared spaces of my home: the living room, dining room table or guest bedroom. The practice must fit within my full professional and family life. A block advances one line and one available interval at a time.

Review

60 WRD/MIN Art Critique by Lori Waxman at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY

"I am neither a reader of poetry nor a sayer of prayers. And yet, I would readily hang Derrick Meads’ 'During #47' by my bedside, in place of both. For the past four or five years, Meads has been crafting small blocks of rich, glossy cherry wood, coating their top surface with a matte white finish, then carving the text of tiny blessings into their every square inch. The words are dense, terse, and unexpected, secular and ripe with organic metaphors. The incisions are angular, taut, and compact, halfwritten, half inscribed. The effect is intense and profound, as if the lines of William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson had been reduced to their essence, rewritten into mantras, and tattooed across the body of a person or the trunk of a tree. Poems and prayers both involve introspection and practice, and the most generous of them eschew judgment in favor of benevolence. Meads combines all that here, and lends it to the reader with grace."

Bio

Derrick Meads is an artist living and working in Lexington, Kentucky. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Grand Valley State University in 1997 and a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2002. His work has been exhibited in Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, California, New York, Michigan and Qatar. His public artwork Because is permanently installed at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh.

Exhibition and acquisition inquiries
derrickmeads@gmail.com