Deborah G. Nehmad’s “Wasted” series, currently on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is a terribly heavy body of work created with the lightest and most fragile of materials: handmade sheets of Nepalese paper, each hand-rubbed and aged to take on the feel of ancient papyrus. The cracks and wrinkles are organized into contrasting rings of light and dark (evoking a gun barrel, urban planning or a petri dish) and perforated by hundreds of small circular burns that are crossed by simple stitches of red or black thread.

Each of these holes represents the death of an American. citizen by gun violence: “wasted (i)” counts children, while “wasted (ii)” and “(iii)” respectively track adults and the nation’s annual average. The panels group these statistics by year: 2003-2005 for “(i)” and “(ii),” and 2009-2013 for “(iii).” Nehmad adds detail to each anonymous mark by stitching red X’s across the holes for suicides, black ones for homicides and both colors for deaths involving police interventions. Unmarked holes represent gun deaths that are accidental or lacking a clear explanation.

Americans shoot themselves and each other every day, periodically wreaking havoc on wider scales. The statistics can be parsed by demographic variables — race, income, gender, age — as we see in newspaper charts. Any of us can access the numbers via the FBI website. But these sterile representations don’t seem to be enough to move the population one way or another, for guns in the U.S. are deeply tied to our emotions.

Here is where the Honolulu artist steps in with works that are brutally frank, deeply emotional and representing a mix of mediation and penance. No machine made these holes or stitched the tiny memorial markers across the resulting void; she did, painstakingly. Each sheet of paper is like a bullet-riddled animal skin, divided into zones of light and dark. Nehmad groups the burned holes within these areas. “wasted (iii)” (annual averages) groups all of the victim-marks into the dark ring, “wasted (i)” shows an apparent migration between zones (though the direction is ambiguous), while “wasted (ii)” seems to represent violence eroding boundaries themselves.

The artist doesn’t include demographic data, but her contrasting color regions can be read by viewers as symbolizing segregation and separation, with each hole representing an intersection of race, class, gender and the viewer’s own emotions.

Nehmad has done a remarkable job of combining narratives of change over time with the opportunity to contemplate single lives lost, as well as entire populations that have fallen victim. Because there are no names or numbers, the viewer is invited to simply think about death itself and to measure his or her own values against the brutal facts.

A lighter region unmarred by these records of violence could stand for the viewer’s lack of awareness, or a population’s relative safety, or enlightenment itself clearing a space. At the same time, the network of dark and light cracks bleed into and blur the colors of the threads, connecting every part of these maps to every other part. There is no escape, which could mean that we are bound together in pursuit of a solution.

“Wasted” is not an optimistic installation, but neither is it didactic or polemic. Nehmad is concerned with data and information, but she is also dedicated to exploring the ritual power of art-making to pursue deeper connections and empathy. She denies us a comparative spatial layout or labels to help us understand how we might rank or assess this representation. And so we are left to explore and interpret this visceral map of the body politic on our own. It’s worth finding out whether we’re up to the challenge.