Stem

The Mystery of Growth

I never see the growth taking place. It appears to me like this:

First act: I receive a bean.
Second act: a jump in time takes me forward.
Third act: I find a bush where I planted the bean.

It was just a boat-shaped piece of squishy green matter when my friend Alice brought it to my studio, which I placed over soil in a ceramic cup and set by the window. I have been watering it, too. Now after a several months or longer, it suddenly appeared as if it transformed overnight from a bean to a bush. I attempt to trace back the time in my mind.  What pops in to my head is like one of those time-lapsed films starting with soil that spits out a stem that curls itself open, spits out another stem and another, and craws up the air, swinging multiple heads left and right like a dinosaur character. That is not an educational film, it is science fiction that is too realistic.

I know other things grow by their own agenda, which always start small but only in retrospect: needs, worries, lists, motivations, friendships, interests, knowledge, skills, muscles. I also know that they can die, much easier at the end than I would initially think, if I just quit feeding them.

Stem is a collection of hand-built ceramic sculptures and vases I presented in the group show, The Green Life, curated by LMAK Gallery in NYC in the spring of 2019. I wanted to show the excitement and anticiapted growth after a long winter. I used optimistic colors on forms reaching upwards, with a healthy strength, in pursuit of light, as if they were aware that they are on their ways to become visible and impossible to ignore one day soon.

2019
Ceramic