I went home and saw the world for the first time. Detroit in the fall of 2018. I went roaming through the abandoned houses in Highland Park and all across the east side. Felt the traces of disappeared lives, ghosts prints all over the neighborhoods, lost histories, trauma, failure, gray sunlight, what was and what could’ve been echoing through. Nature had come back and planted trees in those abandoned homes, and the branches were growing out through the roofs and windows.

So many things lost in those Detroit fires.

I took salvaged scraps of old wood from the bombed out and burned down houses and started painting on them. All these pieces of wood once made up the walls of houses where families and friends lived and loved and died together. In ancient civilizations families used to bury their dead in the walls of their houses. I like the idea of giving new life to these wooden fragments of architecture that once sheltered people and supported life. I think these fragments are supports for my own imagination now, but they still sing ghost songs…

We leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go, inside the homes we live in and leave behind, and all those homes live inside us. Our homes return to nature, and they carry on long after we’re gone.

x0 Jordan Sullivan, Detroit, 2019