As difficult as it is to make art during these times we’re living through, it feels even more uncomfortable to be talking about art. The city where I live has been under siege from ICE for the better part of a year, and news of their abductions just in my own little neighborhood remains a daily occurrence. But I’m not the first person to feel small and helpless while drowning under a buffeting wave of cruelty. None of us are alone here. We still know which way is up, and we just have to keep going that direction.

And meanwhile I’m still making things. I have a shop update set for Friday, 1/16 at 11am Pacific.

I’ve made a beetle carafe and four cups for sharing sake, mezcal, or whatever you like…

A cobalt-washed aquarium mug…

And several miniature boxes for rings or any other special little treasure you might want protected by a small creature. I added gold luster detailing to some of them that felt like they wanted a little extra glimmer.

(These are mostly quite small, and I will add dimensions to the shop listings shortly. I’m always a little behind on that.)

I’m happy with how these all turned out, but the cicada may be favorite from this batch, just because it’s something that I’ve wanted to sculpt for ages but never have until now. I loved the summer cicadas as a kid in the midwest. I would collect their ghostly translucent shells and stick them to my shirt like the fanciest brooch of a forest gnome. The cicadas I grew up with aren’t the red-eyed variety that we hear about emerging in huge broods to scream en mass, these are the chunky green ones who return every year to sing at a much more reasonable decibel in the evenings between school years. Obviously I’m biased, but I find them much cuter and more pleasant to have as neighbors. Hopefully my sculpt reflects that.

In other art news, I finally was able to take a class from a sculptor I’ve long admired, Adam Matano. He was recently commissioned to sculpt the monument to P-22 (Los Angeles’ beloved, departed mountain lion) and it’s easy to see why: the attention to anatomical detail and lifelike gesture in his animal sculpting is just incredible. We started the class at the LA zoo so we could observe our subject: Philip, the male Masai giraffe. The next two days of the class were held in Adam’s studio, where I was excited to see so many examples of his work, especially that huge P-22 in progress (Fun detail: Adam was lent P-22’s actual radio collar so he could accurately represent it in the sculpture, and he brought it out to show us. He said he has to keep in three layers of plastic bag because otherwise the scent of the mountain lion deeply unnerves his studio cat, Phineas)

The type of sculpting that Adam teaches is so fascinating to me that I wanted to document the progress of my piece from three-dimensional stick figure to actual giraffe:

And the finished sculpt looks like this:

Learning new things is such a thrill (…she said, very dorkily), I would take his class ten more times if I could. The new skills and techniques don’t all translate perfectly from this oil-based clay (which never hardens and is used primarily as an original for making casts) to ceramic clay, so I still have some thinking to do (How to best utilize what I learned in ceramic, but also: what would it take to get future work cast in bronze, for example?). But I’m extremely inspired and looking for ways to keep this work going.

Anyway, thanks for following along on this journey, thank you for all of your support in 2025, and here’s to our continued swim upward in 2026.