A significant downside to long breaks between art projects is that when I’m ready to start a new one, I’m overly ambitious. Enter These Are Not Regrets (TANR), an artist book which uses the continuously convoluting carousel structure designed by Graham Patten to rotate through four sequences of illustrations and prose.

Presented through the stages of grief, These Are Not Regrets follows the emotional fallout of a friendship breakup and the search for closure from past events. Read in its codex form, the stages of grief are arranged in a linear fashion. When opened into its continuously convoluting carousel form, the book instead mimics the cyclical nature of grief—moving fore and aft through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, constantly turning in on itself in a non-sequential manner.

Composed of short journal entries written over three years, the reflections in this book convey the inner conflict that follows the abrupt severance of a four-year friendship. The red ribbon, used to keep the book closed in its resting state and open in its carousel form, serves as an ironic nod to the red thread of fate, an East Asian folktale about an invisible string that binds together those destined to meet.

All illustrations and text were hand drawn and hand written and printed with polymer plates on a Chandler & Price Platen Press at San Francisco Center for the Book in 2025.