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Giacomo Leopardi
Every New Year arrives with the same question, cloaked in a new sparkle: what are you going to become now? Resolutions line up like polite demands. Improve this. Fix that. They promise transformation, clarity, progress — but they are rarely neutral wishes. They assume that life, like an object, should be optimized; that the time ahead of us must already know what it is for. A resolution is never just a desire; it is a promise of function.
Leopardi, writing with the kind of melancholy that never fully trusted happy endings, suggested something else — something more seductive: suspension. The good life, he proposed, isn’t the one we already know, or the one we’ve already lived, but the one that remains just out of reach — unknown, unfinished, and therefore still possible. So what if the most radical New Year’s wish is not to resolve anything at all? What if it is to remain unfinished?
In 2020, many of my plans fell through because of the pandemic, and I returned to being a student. I went to study illustration at Falmouth University. Instead of feeling delayed, I felt protected. I found myself in a space where not knowing wasn’t a problem to solve, but the point. During that time, I worked on a project called Mute Little Goose.
It began with artefacts and with making something that didn’t immediately explain itself. André Leroi-Gourhan once wrote that “the human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.” I took this to mean that we don’t always discover who we are by thinking harder; sometimes we have to make something and see ourselves reflected back in it.
I wasn’t interested in the hand as a servant to the brain, obediently executing instructions. I was curious to see what happens when the brain follows instead of leads — when thinking leaks into objects, and meaning shows up late. The longer I worked on the project, the more I noticed how obsessed we are with utility. We want things — and people — to declare their purpose immediately.
Leopardi, writing with the kind of melancholy that never fully trusted happy endings, suggested something else — something more seductive: suspension. The good life, he proposed, isn’t the one we already know, or the one we’ve already lived, but the one that remains just out of reach — unknown, unfinished, and therefore still possible. So what if the most radical New Year’s wish is not to resolve anything at all? What if it is to remain unfinished?
In 2020, many of my plans fell through because of the pandemic, and I returned to being a student. I went to study illustration at Falmouth University. Instead of feeling delayed, I felt protected. I found myself in a space where not knowing wasn’t a problem to solve, but the point. During that time, I worked on a project called Mute Little Goose.
It began with artefacts and with making something that didn’t immediately explain itself. André Leroi-Gourhan once wrote that “the human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.” I took this to mean that we don’t always discover who we are by thinking harder; sometimes we have to make something and see ourselves reflected back in it.
I wasn’t interested in the hand as a servant to the brain, obediently executing instructions. I was curious to see what happens when the brain follows instead of leads — when thinking leaks into objects, and meaning shows up late. The longer I worked on the project, the more I noticed how obsessed we are with utility. We want things — and people — to declare their purpose immediately.
Michelangelo left many of his sculptures unfinished — not because he couldn’t finish them, but because some divine guidance hadn’t arrived yet. Non-finito as a form of faith. Which made me realize that creativity doesn’t come from mastery alone, but from incapacity — from not being able, or not being willing, to fully arrive.
When people encounter Mute Little Goose, they usually ask the same question: What is it? Or what is it for? What fascinates me isn’t the question itself, but the urgency behind it. Why do we need to know right away?
This year, my wish is not to be more productive, more disciplined, or more resolved. If Leopardi is right — if the good life is the one we are not yet acquainted with — then perhaps the most honest New Year’s wish is to remain available, to stay open.
Here I am to wish you a very happy 2026 — whatever it turns out to be. Let’s meet it slowly and stay a little longer with what we don’t yet know.