Nap

An invitation to an enchanting forest of lights and sculptures and take a quiet moment away from noise and clutter of everyday lives.

A nap relaxes us and energizes us, and when it's over, lets us go back to do our own thing. I wanted to create a space just like that, a brief midday break from the noise and clutter.  It's not a backpacking journey that I don't know whether or when I will return. Rather, it is only a few-minutes trip that I will come back from to where I started before drifting away.

In this show I am showing new work together with work I have made over the last year, all installed to be experienced in a new way. After my last exhibition I felt something was missing, something to anchor to our everyday lives, so I decided to add a chair (please sit).  I want to find beautiful and strange things right around us, not only in our distant memories or hopes for the future or out somewhere else, and I want my work to belong to a place close to us.

Two summers ago, I traveled to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. On the beaches I saw stones with multiple smooth round deep indentations made by sea bugs. I found one, looked around, and found more. I collected more of these strange stones as we trekked along the coast. They looked intentionally made, like an inscription, as if it's supposed to mean something. They were like faces, some look friendlier, funnier or meaner than others. The holes made me curious and want to get closer to them. I think this was when I started incorporating holes in my work. Each form is hand-built in white earthenware, terra-cotta, or stoneware clay, then finished in engobe with oxides and mason stains, and fired in an electric kiln in my studio in Brooklyn.

I hope you take a little break to let your mind wander through the forms. Let the noise from the busy day recede. We all know how to nap.

2019
ceramic, steel cable, lighting components
Nap was exhibited at Sculpture Space NYC in Long Island City, NY in 2019