Sketchbook
2022 - 2024
Field Drawings
2020-2022
Tempera Paintings
Egg tempera on gray board, 2022-
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.
Shadow Drawings
2020-2021
Selected field drawings, tracing the shade cast on paper.
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.
Blue Gum
2023 (WIP)
String Figures
Fired and Unfired Ceramic studio experiments and composites 2020.
Manuports
2020These ceramic sculptures were assembled alongside foraged driftwood, wolf lichen, granite boulders and photographed in early morning light at Tokopah Falls, Sequoia National Park, September 2020.
Workshops Archive
My workshops aim to meet hands-on learning experiences with deep collective thinking. I think it makes a huge difference to learn through tactile exploration, to chat and play as we make, cross-pollinating our ideas.
These are the skills we build together, to fertilize new ways of thinking and re-member ritualistic making practices, for communion with an always changing, growing, dying, living world.
Making Oddkin Series
A ceramics workshop exploring earthling ecology!Ongoing series, 2024
Making Oddkin: Backyard Bugs
July 2 2024, at Debs Park, Los AngelesIn this first session, we focussed on backyard bugs, thinking about coexistence and collaboration with our invertebrate neighbors. Workshoppers looked to insect morphology for sculptural inspiration and discussed ‘beneficial bugs’ and how to encourage local habitats.
In each session participants sculpted an insect-inspired ceramic pendant to charm their garden or doorway. In addition to the workshop instruction, participants were provided with some supplementary reading material; including the artist’s zine of with ecological gardening tips, vintage insect morphology diagrams and an excerpt of bug-fiction from Ursula K. Le Guin!
According to studies published by Biological Conservation (2019), 40% of all insects are declining globally, with a third of them endangered. We must not dismiss the plight of the creepy-crawlies! The insect apocalypse would have catastrophic effects on our ability to grow food. Our pollinators are essential to life on earth.
Eco-feminist scholar Donna Haraway coined the phrase ‘making oddkin’, proposing the necessity for kinship with the more-than-human beings we share our home with.
This workshop opened an opportunity for playful making and collective thinking in the face of climate catastrophe. A tactile entryway to the ecological conversation, a place to share resources and promote awareness of the small-but-mighty actions we can take to foster habitats in our neighborhoods.
As we thought and sculpted in collectivity, we practiced fundamental ceramic hand-building techniques. I think of hand-building is an ideal conversation-craft, conducive to sitting gathered around a table, our hands muddling away, as we discuss these tangly topics.
This workshop facilliatated a tendrilly conversation, where participants could ask questions, share garden-bug tales and stretch out their feelers out in clay!
References
Biological Conservation 2019
Fresh Air, NPR, 2022
Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Cthuluscene
Making Oddkin: Plant-Pollinator Symbiosis (3 Parts)
Current Offering: August 11, 18 and 25, 2024, at Debs Park, Los Angeleswith artist-naturalist Rosie Brand and plant ecologist Yara Nictè Herrarte.
In these three evening sessions, our focus will be plant-pollinator symbiosis. We’ll study monarch butterflies and native milkweeds, chaparral yucca and their exclusive moth lovers and discover the expansive world of native bees and their plant communities. Each of these reciprocal relationships tell an intricately specific interspecies love story. Co-evolved symbionts can teach us what it means to belong to one another, in an ever-increasingly troubled world.
As we think and make together we’ll practice fundamental ceramic hand-building techniques, looking to insect morphology for sculptural inspiration. Hand-building is so conducive to conversation; sitting gathered around a table, with hands muddling away, as we discuss these tangly topics.
In each session of Making Oddkin, participants will sculpt an insect-inspired ceramic pendant to charm their garden or doorway. If participants are able to take multiple workshops, they will string their charms together to make a garden garland, though individual charms work beautifully as single pendants.
In addition to workshop instruction, participants will receive supplementary reading materials; excerpts of insect-inspired fiction/media and a zine of drawings, diagrams and ecological gardening tips!
Facillitators:
Yara Nictè Herrarte is a wholehearted naturalist and plant ecology graduate with love deeply rooted in California native flora, pollination ecology, and land stewardship.
She has worked with the Xerces Society, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the US Forest Service, the Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden, as well as the Huntington Garden. She has spent the last 6 months in Costa Rica researching tropical butterfly species, their longevity, along with their associated parasitoids and predators.
Rosie Brand is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator, living on Tongva land: Los Angeles, CA.
She is a certified California Naturalist and holds workshops at various arts institutions and community centers such as Heavy Manners Library, Feminist Center for Creative Work and The Infinite School. She is the founder and co-facilitator of the collaborative project worm school, who hold community reading-discussions with material exercises for thinking hands.
Clay Seed Pod II
2024Various iterations for adults and all ages held at Plant Material, Altadena.
In this one-day ceramics workshop we observed a collection of locally foraged seed pods, learning from their more-than-human architectures. Exploring these tactile forms through clay, we practiced essential ceramic handbuilding techniques to create botanical sculptures: Clay Seed Pods.
In this workshop, we asked-
What can be learned by looking closely at the very small, the unnoticed, the dispossessed and decomposing parts of our world?
I have learned so much from these intricate anomalous structures. This is the language of plants, weeds and seeds. It’s one you can only speak with your hands.
Seed pods have much to say about holding carefully, about carrying precious and precarious futures. Seed pods contain the knowledge of letting go. Seed pods know how to make and unmake themselves.
This class had various iterations for adults and all ages, open to students of all levels of clay experience. This workshop is an ongoing offering, please contact for more information on future sessions.
Clay Seed Pod Workshop I
2022-2023Held at various locations around Los Angeles including Heavy Manners Library in Echo Park, Artist’s Studio in San Gabriel Valley, LA Arboreteum and Westridge High School in Pasadena.
In this workshop, participants looked to a collection of locally foraged seed pods, in order to learn from their more-than-human architectures. These tactile forms were explored through clay, using essential ceramic handbuilding techniques to create both ephemeral and permanent sculptures; clay seed pods. Some clay pods were embedded with native wildflower seeds to be gifted back to the land, and others were filled with clay ‘seeds’, making rattlers to call in the rains.
Holding The River, An Underground Watering Pot Workshop
hosted by Ako Castuera and Rosie BrandOctober 2022.
Artists’ Studio, San Gabriel Valley.
In this one day, in-person workshop, we used ceramic handbuilding techniques to make underground watering pots (often known as ollas). These vessels are among the most ancient and water efficient technologies for gardening in dry conditions; unglazed and low fired, they allow water to slowly release through clay walls, reaching the roots of plants while preventing surface evaporation and overwatering. With the continuation of long term drought ahead of us, the watering pot is a practical tool for delivering water to where it’s needed in the garden. To bring hands and intention to the creation & use of this vessel is a way to hold and sustain our connection to water as a living being.
We gratefully acknowledge Payahuunadu (aka Owens Valley) as a primary, living source of water that has been unwillingly diverted to faucets and hoses in Los Angeles, and we honor the Nuumu / Owen’s Valley Paiute as her stewards.
‘Holding’ allows a shift from language of money and control (“conservation” “efficiency” “savings”) towards something more personal. We hold the water that keeps us alive. We hold the water of many living bodies, all mixed up: Payahuunadu, The Colorado River, the Feather River, and many, many others. They flow into and out of our homes, passing through pipes, pumps, buckets, our bodies and bathtubs. With very basic acts, we hold and shape the river. How will the river shape us?
This workshop has been practiced with three separate groups in October 2022, It is an ongoing project, we hope to offer future sessions.
