After moving to Missouri to begin teaching, I found myself trying to – in a sense – finalize the ideas that had dominated my thinking through graduate school. I conceived of the body as a zone of incident and arena of contention. During this time I wrote an as-yet unpublished text about the uncovered body in Christian theology, and had been looking at books such as Nigel Spivey’s Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude and James Elkins‘s Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. The ideas in those books have continued influencing my work and thinking, but 2009 marked pivot point away from the rectilinear format and toward the tondo (circular) format.