Hello, I’m Jes Kalled. I write, and work across the mediums of photography, painting, film, and dance. Some of my published work can be found in Tokyo Weekender, Metropolis Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, or on my website.

I just moved back home to New Hampshire after living in Japan for a decade. This is my first time in five years to see my family, and the home I grew up in. Swallow is an ongoing documentation project born two years ago that allows me to write about personhood, and place.

Many entries are curious about memory, perception, and the relationship we have to our environments, and to ourselves. Swallow, though always evolving, is a project that seeks to document our connections, vulnerabilities, and gaps.

Swallow as verb

1. to cause or allow (something, i.e. food or drink) to pass down the throat.

飲み込む nomikomu

2. take in and cause to disappear; engulf.

Swallow as noun

1. a migratory swift-flying songbird with a forked tail and long pointed wings, feeding on insects in flight.

ツバメ tsubame

I used to have a small paragraph here saying how often Swallow would arrive in your inbox. I still feel comfortable predicting that it’s a monthly or bi-monthly occurrence. However, more and more I find my practices taking forms of their own. Swallow will come when she comes. And I hope you enjoy the process of that too.

For people who appreciate and enjoy this work, and my work as an artist outside of this project, I invite you to become a paid subscriber to support me and what I do. Know that you are contributing directly to making an artist’s life more sustainable. Thank you for being here.

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payment & support

$5 a month

$50 a year — a discount of 17%

$150 - Founding Members — For people who have the ability to do support Swallow this way. Founding members will receive an art print on fine art paper in the mail from me, and a handwritten letter of gratitude for supporting this project.

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More about Swallow;　スワローについて

By orienting itself through/around location, each chapter of Swallow observes the temporality of things: the beauty there, the pain and passage—the movement.

A paragraph from The city and her aloneness perhaps best describes Swallow’s origins:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“The city and her aloneness doesn’t feel solvable. Neither does the forest I came from. But in me I find them both taking up residence. I will attempt to document them here. I had forgotten that this was my original intention, for the world to swallow me up and tell me everything. To look outside windows, and have a sense of self, somewhere in the belly of things. I believe this is precisely how this project exists, episodic in nature, fertile and fragile, but in the belly of things—swallowed—as something eaten and yet it eats.”