It’s difficult to feel closeness. I prepare talking points like a student caught in a nightmare trying to verbally work her way out.  I’m not succinct. Somewhere in the thread of words (as new to me as they are to my company) is myself that I am trying to offer. Offer to feel close. 

I speak quickly, but I build slowly. 

There is no space for mania in pinching pots or squeezing coils. And at this pace, I can hear the little pieces of myself translating through the tangled verbal web of all the other words I try to use to introduce myself.

Many sculptures are unrequested gravestones made after a funeral. Making the winding lines to make sense. Big scary questions that are more approachable in clay than in my mouth. I ask and play out answers as I make, building upwards compelled by a technical idea that reveals its true emotional weight brick by brick. Every finger mark, every bump, every color, drip, crack, choice, mistake, buckle, ripple, is a small flash of communication. 

I tell me about myself in forms like idioms. Reaching through a clever idea that can’t materialize in writing like it can in stone. And the water from the boulder, like the milk from the cheese, tells me what I am made of and what I am strong enough to pull out. 

Aphrodite spent her life after Adonis planting anemone. Love with nowhere to go is better planted than private.

I have had a lot of different motivators at different stages in my practice. I feel compelled to put the aesthetics into eras of my life but the emotional through-line has been consistent: what am I feeling and what does it look like? Making sculptures, making sense.

The eras have been:

• Think about biting into cake [garish flowers challenging toxic notions romantic love]

• I am better in person [cringe and interpersonal relationship confusion]

• Aphrodite’s Anemone [grief and self identity and grace and love and so much loss]