The One You Feed, 2017, ceramic

Childhood is my metaphor for grief; a way of continuing to feel love and conjure memories of the past, a calm heaviness that holds me in a place of both sadness and nostalgia. Memories of times before the recent passing of my grandfather are sacred spaces, while others that uncoil can be unwelcome. My metaphor is a recurring theme in my work, drawing on childhood simultaneously as both the fairy tale and the nightmare. My sculptures are often vessels that capture the echoes of small children playing; sometimes the echoes are of my own voice borrowed from the time and place they were created years ago.

My tactile relationship with clay is my process of release and understanding. When I’m working on a piece, I feel in fleeting moments that it’s come to life, existing both here in reality and in its own surreal narrative. Working with my forms and creating these brief moments for myself are my last lingering stitches of childhood and a way to connect myself to what is no longer my tangible reality. For a moment, the fantastical objects in my world are alive and the stories I am telling are curiously real