How might we construct our world in a way that centers material, childish wonder, personal & cultural histories? How does the act of searching for this way forward exemplify the world in which we want to be living while revealing what has been lost? And how can play inform a methodology for how we search? These questions form around the pottery-making that has grounded my studio practice for several years. House-framing diagrams combine with structures like the I-beam to inspire many of the shapes, as does a desire for a step-by-step assembly feel to the building of every cup and plate. Word searches with words like up, down, left and right cover the surface to give direction to the user's day as well as a chance for a bit of play through finding. The pots are slow to build, but their careful craft has become for me an antidote to the lack of intimacy with materials my screen-centric world always seems to be pushing.
These questions of searching and locating also arise in my sculptural work - some of it seeking to reimagine tools like the plumb bob and the level - tools meant to navigate a builder by centering, correcting, steering, pointing. Other tools are specific to celestial navigation, a technique naturally structural and connected to a child-like impulse to "look up" for an answer. Each object is made by layering materials that feel elemental and akin to home building like clay, plaster, wood, and metal. Layers are sanded back and unearthed to give a visual history of hands tending to them, loving them, finding them. And although none of the tools are intended for function, they work on me, revealing the possibility and power of searching for something through process.
And what if part of that process was play? Can it be a tool to construct and navigate our world? I am reminded of the play that invents whole universes for children when they want to cocoon themselves away from their current one, that uses blankets above instead of a night sky. My recent work centers around blanket forts, created in earthenware and colored pencil as I want them to feel somewhere between a sculpture and an illustration, between memory and tangible, adult and child. Choices about placement and coloration are made as intuitively as possible, letting play define process. The forts teach me that searching for the perfect world takes practice just as children build one world to prepare them for another.