I ate my first panna cotta in a café housed in a cool cave. The dessert and the immediate relief the cave provided (the stone maintains nearly the same temperature year round) from the hot, dusty ride were restorative and I felt as if I had transformed into a troglodyte myself. It was a short lived transformation, but there will never be a panna cotta to match it. We rode in and out of a quarry, and took a steep winding path through a troglodyte village. There was a deep visceral connection - the chalky stone like something out of primordial lake bed and how safe and cool it felt within - mixed with an enchanted, mystical kind of reverence akin to being in a primitive cathedral.

I like to make homes for things I make. They tend to be cavelike, nichelike, ceramic arches with nooks or shelves or varied openings. I think of them as my troglodytes - small creature-like sculptures occupying their own improvised homes.

These little bits of architecture likely reflect a Catholic upbringing. The BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) could most certainly find refuge in one of the arches. It would be just like those sacred images of saints enshrined to worm their way into my psyche and attempt to invent a kind of sanctity by providing the things I make with a home and a halo.

I also love the idea of creating small scale worlds complete with landscapes and shelters. Gonzalo Fonseca’s secret worlds and totems are mesmerizing. They strike the same mysterious chord that Stonehenge and games of Myst and Riven did for me growing up. His sculpture worlds inspire action (you want to finger walk up the stairs, set the hanging ball in motion, work the pulley) and a desire for exploration and excavation. They are their own kind of pygmy troglodytes - but abandoned ones filled with artifacts and relics to be wondered at. Fonseca actually took pictures of quarries and drew his fantastic visions onto the photos. He modeled his sculptures after those quarry drawings, just as the troglodytes built their homes into abandoned quarries.

Gonzalo Fonseca, Tabatinga, 1984

Henry Moore’s Helmet Heads are a kind of small scale, individual shelter built for one. The architecture is modeled after knight’s helmets, but they often house creatures that appear less aggressor, and more like strange invertebrate vulnerables in womblike caves.

Henry Moore, Helmet Head no.2, 1955

If sculpture, art, the making of anything, is an attempt at externalizing something internal, trying to expose the subterranean, then one might feel the need to build those things a home once they reached the outside. Give them their own worlds, or at least the safety of a cave. And not just protection, but the possibility of maturation. Allow the seed the possibility of sun, but with enough coverage to germinate. Give the caterpillar its cocoon.

It would be a disservice to dissect and separate the interiors of these bits of architecture from the architecture itself. Wouldn't it? I just as often find myself making a home and then repurposing some bit I’ve made to fit inside, or I’ll make something new expressly to turn the cave into a home. That experimentation with objects and their relationship to one another is perhaps the most stimulating work I do. They are separate but of apiece. They are not empty shelters, or solitary sculptures, they belong to one another. As a home belongs to a person, and a person belongs in their home.

But what if the occupant is removed? Or the viewer is transformed into the occupant?

Maira Kalman and her son, Alex Kalman, in their recreation of her late mother and his late grandmother’s closet, did create an empty domestic space in remembrance of its owner. Sara Berman’s Closet is an homage to a woman with singular taste and particular choices. Hers was an exclusively white wardrobe and she appears to have kept it most militantly. Inviting the wide world to view a loved one’s most personal space is a profound memorial to her life and eccentricities. And, really, what is a better expression of adoration than to celebrate a beloved’s specific brand of peculiarity?

Maira Kalman and Alex Kalman, Sara Berman’s Closet, 2015

I had the chance to walk through Do Ho Suh’s 348 West 22nd St, a recreation of the artist’s apartment in New York made nearly entirely in fabric. It is also a memorial of a kind, and has the undeniable specificity of a real home, but devoid of personal effects it only suggests the life lived within. It was an almost eerie, dreamlike experience to walk through its ethereal cloth walls. It is architecturally intimately rendered down to the plumbing and sockets. It gives the effect of walking through someone’s well-worn memory of a home, or walking with someone through their home with their eyes closed. But in this memory, the individual has been excised to leave a ghost of a home. A kind of haunted house.

Do Ho Suh, 348 West 22nd St, 2011-15

Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction presents the bag as the foremost invention in human evolution, and the potential salvation of storytelling. This idea of a bag rather than a club or implement of violence as the key and primary invention of humanity empowers Le Guin to recognize her place within it -

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it is useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark of leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again - if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely gladly, for the first time.”

If putting a thing in a bag is the pinnacle of humanity, then making a sculpture in a home is an expression of that self-same most human impulse. It belongs in that same collection that Le Guin believed was the best, strongest way to neutralize the combative, brutal hero narrative that dominates our society. The death narrative, the “killer story” as she terms it, the story of the club, that was/is so pervasive but so unnatural it made her feel inhuman. In her essay, Le Guin urges action -

“It sometimes seems that that story [the killer story] is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subjects, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”

Make a thing. Give it a home. It can be a bag or an arch. It can be made of clay, or of stone, or built directly into the stone itself. A shelter can be made of a helmet. A closet can stand in for a life. Transparent, delicate fabric can ephemerally memorialize and share a home with a stranger.

Make a thing. Give it shelter. Tell the story of a thing cared for enough to give it a home. Tell the story of life.

When my mind is blank, I see an egg. To me, it is a perfect thing. A most favorite shape. A comfort.

Round, full, but not the oppressive infinity of a circle. Not the unknowable curve of a sphere whose perfection makes it impossible to find purchase. You couldn’t climb a sphere. You can easily imagine climbing an egg. An egg is knowable. We all understand an egg, though its purpose is to shield.

I often wish that color was as clear for me as shape - in my life and in what I make. But my mind feels a more shadowy place, and colors don’t find me the way light and dark and shape do. The result is that many things I make can be almost anemic - soft-shelled white shapes that might pop out of, or disappear into their backgrounds.

When my mind is blank, I see an egg. It is a promise, a portent, a future. An affirmation, a recitation. I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I make. Make an egg, make an egg, make an egg.

Make like Salvador Dalí and make an egg a parapet.

Make like Agnes Martin and make an egg of lines.

Make like René Magritte and make an egg in a cage.

The egg can sit on a pedestal. In a cave. On an altar. In a nest. It can break to reveal your ambition; your search for hope and promise. It conceals your doubt.

When my mind is blank, I see an egg. There is no desolation. I cannot abide the emptiness of nothing. Of blank. Fill the space with a promise.

Make an egg, make an egg, make an egg.

Growing up in Southern California, one never forgets that the world is unstable. At the start of every school year, along with pencil cases we packed large Ziplock bags full of canned Vienna sausages, granola bars, and other nonperishables in case there was a major earthquake and we were stranded - our parents unable to reach us because the earth had quite literally opened up, and maybe swallowed them whole.

As a kid exploring the hillsides near my house, there were large fissures in the ground. Big cracks that I was sure were fault lines, and if I happened to be standing near one during an earthquake, the earth would literally open up and swallow me whole.

Maybe it’s no wonder I love to manipulate clay, refined dirt, and make it do what I want. No surprise that I’d want to work with clay and learn how to bend it to my will, rather than fear it. But fissures still haunt me.

Cracks are the clay responding to “too much.” The clay has been pushed too far - too fast, too abrupt, too hot, too dry, too cold, too wet, too much effort- and can happen at any of the several stages of working with clay. You might suspect the cause, but the variables are numerous and you will never know for certain.

At my last optometrist appointment, the doctor told me my eyes were straining to adjust from distance to up-close seeing. They were fatigued. I blame searching clay for minute cracks. Before I let myself feel the exhilaration of work successfully out of the kiln, I examine every inch, inside and out, for cracks. Those little failures that mean the whole thing has failed.

It’s a heartbreak every time.

And yet, I’ve never learned how to resolve them. There are ample methods to try to mend a crack, but I’ve rarely been motivated to attempt such recoveries. The clay has told me its limits, and they are to be respected.

My studio is populated by such failures. I’ve mended them once or twice, not to hide the cracks, but to highlight and clearly show the damage in blue epoxy. Once I let a large unfired piece with a hairline crack, the result of uneven drying, sit out in the rain to slowly disintegrate and return back to is natural sludge state.

A small compendium of cracks in clay

The Chumash, a local indigenous tribe, believed earthquakes were caused by two snakes that held up the earth. Early newspaper reporters described an earthquake as akin to a wet spaniel shaking its back the earth moved with such tension and vigor. Spanish missionaries recorded earthquakes in terms of how many prayers, Creeds and Hail Marys, might be recited before they ended.

Earthquakes often correspond with other calamities - fires, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions. The major earthquake of my childhood, the ‘94 Northridge earthquake, unleashed lethal dirt clouds of Coccidioidomycosis or Valley Fever from the earth.

When the earth, the dirt itself, is alive - a dog shaking its wet fur, two snakes battling below our feet, a dormant fungi sprung to life - our vocabulary and means of intellectualizing the experience are inefficient. For the same reason, though in much safer, smaller doses of humility, I leave my cracked pieces cracked.

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These Leonard Cohen lines sing out in my head when I know I am doing something that will push the clay, potentially past its limits. The cracks are a testament to the fragility of the clay, and the sculptor. But as someone who has spent 10 years working with clay it means I am never through. There are always more things to learn, different clays to try, different ways to push. The cracks remind me that I have chosen to live without the complacency of perfection.

From childhood, I’ve known no matter the attempts at perfection - even in little boxes on the hillside suburbia - an earthquake can collapse the homes on one side of the street while the identical homes on the other side hold fast. There is always the threat of the earth opening up to swallow you whole. Control is only a fractured frame of mind.

I find myself making ladders. Imagining them suspended and floating in the sky. Some physical means to ascend to the heavens.

They are small and scattered around my studio, hanging over my son’s bed (an escape into dreams rather than a means of catching them), or very large, several feet high, made of clay and slowly drying to be like stone. They lead only to some sort of up, but the making is a slow transportation of its own.

A ladder is a solitary device - intended for one body, one user at a time. It is a liminal space made more illusive by the fact that it is a mobile device - you could walk by a ladder every day always pledging to venture up the next, but on that special tomorrow the ladder, and your chances of ascending, could have easily disappeared. There are no assurances with a ladder. Even walking beneath one is, of course, considered a curse.

So what does it mean if you make ladders of a size to carry in your pocket? Or tack to your wall? Would they be small reminders encouraging an ascent?

Miró’s “Dog Barking at the Moon” features a floating ladder and dog “barking” beneath it with a clown-nosed moon lording over the scene. The painting is often interpreted as a testament to art and Miró’s ambitions - the dog is Miró, the ladder, his art, by which he will achieve greatness and reach the moon.

Joan Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926

However weighted the image or symbol of a ladder might be, it would be an error to overlook that it is fundamentally a satisfying shape - simple lines organizing space into boxes, which in paintings or sculpture can serve as windows. And so so vertical. So up and down!

Joan Miró, The Escape Ladder, 1940

Gertrude Abercrombie, Two Ladders, 1947

Georgia O’Keefe, Ladder to the Moon, 1958

In these paintings, ladders are not imposing, but their geometry is an intrusion into an imaginative natural world or landscape. They are a striving in themselves - an artist’s reminder of their hand in this creation - you may be tempted as a viewer to let the world depicted entrance you, to give yourself over to the imaginary, but do not forget that it has been imagined.

Medieval Christians developed a hierarchy of all material and life (derived from a theory of Artistotle’s) called scala natura or Ladder of Being. At the top of this ladder, the divine - God and the angels; in the middle, with dominion over earth - humans; then the higher and lower animals, and on down to the inorganic - rocks and minerals. A ladder seems an imperfect metaphor as it indicates movement and transition between rungs and statuses. The unintended suggestion being that people could, over time, climb to become God, or descend and become so much mud. But maybe there is an element of truth to that - that there can at least be moments or flashes of transcendence. And, for the opposite end of the ladder, the truth of ashes to ashes.

Titian, The Assumption, 1516-1518

If the Virgin Mary ascended a ladder into heaven instead of being assumed (sucked up in God Almighty’s heavenly vacuum as I have always envisioned it, though most Renaissance accounts depict her escorted by a melange of angels via a cloud hoverboard), wouldn’t that have made for a very different story? Mightn’t she have made stops along the way as she wished? Mightn’t she have completed the requisite tasks for at least half a hero’s journey to the heavens? Mightn’t she have visited Miró’s moon, or his amoeba-headed floating world? Or Georgia O’Keefe’s perfect half moon? Or Gertrude Abercrombie’s sickle moon, or her sickly, deflated cotton candy cloud?

I might touch the clay ladder in my coat pocket - run my thumb along its side and feel each rung. It might bring me back to earth. It might promise ascent.

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Ambition birds are most active at night, but will awaken any moment serenity is proposed. They are that agitated recognition that time is not limitless, and rest is time wasted.

It feels both a particular and general recognition - that some achievement, some poem written, some sculpture formed will free that bird, and free your longing.

But there are always more birds, or maybe always the same bird. There is no real satisfaction. It is the pursuit of life, and the pursuit only brings deeper acquaintance with the desire.

My ambition bird has flown the coop.

She is not free, but no longer lives within my heart only to stir and flop in the darkness of night. She pecks at my head, tries to make a nest in my hair - always catching me unawares and frantically trying to bat her off.

She is more restful if granted quarter. If I let her nest up there, she can’t catch me off guard. She is instead a kind of pet; not caged, but one I will never free. Her reminders of the lateness of the hour and the work left to make become my fixations with objects - my late night (still her most formidable hour) solitary conversations with objects. All with the hope of someday getting it right.

My ambitions are in these objects. In the things I make by hand, and the promise of what I might make next.

Let’s examine some birds - the strange mind bends that keep me up at night and the shapes they take in my waking hours. This newsletter will explore the ways my ambition bird takes flight.