Studio Ceramics, 2023-2024
Selected small sculptures.
Sketchbook
2022 - 2024
The Names
2021-2022
This body of work seeds out of grief. It is my processing of the year I cared for my Mum as she lived and died with brain cancer. Tumors affected her ability to express herself, my role as carer included acting as translator. I read her needs through non-verbal communication. This connection was beautiful, awful, heartbreaking. As our communication fell away, so did my capacity to describe that trauma.
I returned to the studio after her passing, in search of the language to tell our story. There, the sun cast a stream of light through my window as I worked. Clay came alive, growing plant-like, shape-shifting vessels. Their shadows stretched out, informing their own becoming. Abstract wreaths, unraveling baskets, wriggling spider-hands carried me through grief toward a place of healing. I caught those glyphic shadows in cyanotypes.
The work itself is an act of translation. I transcribe loss to transform it. I search for meaning in the gaps between mediums, in the chasm of lost words. To hold what was lost, I press shadows to the page and bind them in blue.
Field Journal
2022-2023
I am interested in altering everyday human perception by focusing on the minute details of plant morphology. In my field journal, I draw wild neighbourhood plants, observing the tactile characteristics of my local ecology along the Arroyo Seco. I watch red alder roots breathe in the water, listening for the stories of mugwort and manroot. I learn to distinguish corolla from calyx, to recognise subtle changes as a bloom bloats to fruit. To avoid extraction, I forage the negative space between stem and branch, the serrated line at toyon-leaf edge. I find perfectly architectured seed pods in the mulch, ephemeral structures that teach how to hold, and to release. This practice of gathering is what feeds my studio work, an exploration of found forms; intertwining ceramics, drawing and writing into speculative worlds for becoming-with the more-than-human.
Blue Gum
2023 (WIP)
