There is a Chinese saying: “Life starts with a breath, and ends with one.” This breath is a constant, threading seconds, minutes, days into a lifetime.

Measuring, with my own—17 breaths a minute, for 8 minutes 46 seconds, it totals 149 breaths. The absence of 149 breaths is what it took, for life to depart from a human being, George Floyd.

How would we try to begin to fathom, and to heal? It starts, perhaps, with a breath of our own. 2020 had been a year centered around breathing, or, the inability of doing so. In this air that we share, for life and for death, a breath connects us all.

Between March and May 2020, I sewed 1000+ Prayer Masks, using prayer flags from the 2013 THIRST public art project. The same prayer masks are used to create A Breath.

“…Each mask stands in for the social contract we make to protect others. It serves as a calamity-filter for our lungs yet, here, the mask foils breath because of the watery cement coating that has rendered it impervious, hard and fragile. Beili speaks of that dipping and drying process as ‘taking the life out of the mask.’ Each breath, heavy in its absence, fraught, vulnerable, ghostly. Powerlessly witnessed then, tenderly commemorated now.”

- Annette DiMeo Carlozzi