place.mat is a site-responsive art project developed during the Bischoff Inn Micro-Residency in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. Born in Tamaqua in 1985 and placed for adoption three days later, the artist did not grow up in the region and has no conventional childhood relationship to the town. Returning through the residency became an opportunity to consider how a place can shape identity even when a person’s connection to it begins before conscious memory. In place.mat, Tamaqua becomes an emotional and psychological point of origin that exists as fact, absence, and imagined landscape.

The project is also shaped by grief. As a teenager, the artist lost his friend Corey Bischof to suicide. The impact of that loss remained largely unprocessed for many years, and the similarity between Bischof’s name and the Bischoff Inn Micro-Residency felt too resonant to overlook. Rather than functioning as a direct memorial, place.mat makes room for delayed mourning, coincidence, memory, and the subtle ways unresolved loss can continue to shape a life.

Developed during a period of profound personal transition, the work was shaped by separation, new intimacy, and emotional reorientation. Through its relationship to Tamaqua, place.mat asks how identity is formed through distance, time, memory, and circumstance. It is a project about the places we leave, the places that remain within us, and the unexpected ways grief and love can guide us back to ourselves.