The artist
I have been seeing faces since I was five.
I don't remember a time I wasn't making something with my hands. As a child I saw faces in every surface — in bathroom tiles, in the grain of the kitchen table, in the side of a mountain. I looked at driftwood and stains on walls and saw not nothing, but possibility — what the thing could become, what was already alive inside it.
For a long time I struggled to call myself an artist. I have a Fine Arts degree, but the art world seemed to want a particular key — conceptual frameworks, a suffering credential, an identity badge — and I had none of it. What I had was a compulsion to see truly. People's words rarely matched their faces, and so I learned, early, to read what was really there. Faces don't lie the way language does. That looking became the whole of my work.
I create the conditions. The work arrives.
When I'm making, I trust my instincts and assume it will work out. I'm not attached to the outcome, so it's safe to make mistakes. I make marks until the right one lands — through the moments of being sure it won't work — and in the end it is usually something I love. Especially with clay, it's less about copying something that already exists and more about letting something appear. Seeing what wasn't there before.
The women arrive wearing their own attributes — a crown of stars, peacock eyes, a halo woven from cane, branches still in leaf. I don't assign them. They speak what they are; I don't tell them. They are archetypal rather than specific — outside any time or culture — turned inward, eyes lowered, busy with some interior work. They are not performing for the viewer. They are being witnessed.
The grandmothers I never had.
I grew up without elders — no grandmothers, no women whose wisdom was handed down to me through touch and story. Some of this sculpting has felt like building them myself: a protective collective, my own witnesses, made from earth by hand. A feminine lineage rebuilt from scraps.
And that, I think, is what the work offers other people. So many women carry the same severance — the same hunger for an elder feminine that wasn't there, the same sense that there is more beneath the surface than we are shown. The work meets them in that reaching. It says: I see you. You were never invisible. Here is the proof, pulled out of earth with my hands.
Women create the conditions for something with soul to land into matter. We are portals. And so is every piece I make.