Getting to the Heart of the Matter

From a luminous cast-glass heart, a chorus of hands rises, each shaped into a letter of American Sign Language, together spelling LGBTQ+. The heart is not pierced or broken here. It is speaking. What it says, it says in a language of the hands: eloquent, deliberate, impossible to mistake.

There is a long history of communities forced to speak in ways the world refused to hear, in coded gestures, in signs exchanged in plain sight, in tongues the powerful never bothered to learn. This work gathers that history into a single form. The hands do not emerge from the head, the seat of argument, but from the heart, the seat of love. Identity, the piece insists, is not a position to be debated. It is a truth felt before it is ever spoken.

Housed within an endless mirror box and crowned with sacred-heart finials of red glass, the heart multiplies outward into infinity, one act of self-declaration becoming a congregation of them, reflected without end. To get to the heart of the matter is to arrive, at last, at the simplest thing: that these lives are held, are luminous, and have always been speaking.