“… a sculpture’s base is also recognized to be the critical point of contact between the reality of the world, where mortals like you and I live, and the ideality of art, where imagination reigns.”[1]

My work has long explored the concept of “support.” I integrate supportive elements of the body—hands, feet, arms and legs—with objects and architectural components that serve similar functions, such as shoes, table legs, brackets, and columns. This series, Holding On, focuses on the pedestal—the fundamental support of sculpture itself. My challenge was to create the pedestals before or during the creation of the sculptures, combining found and fabricated objects, including tables, lecterns, and hewn wood blocks.

The sculptures themselves are ceramic amalgamations of body parts, formed using recycled molds from past projects. By working with malleable clay, I could create spiraling, intertwined compositions that seem to “hold” themselves together. To disrupt the literalness of the bodily forms, I transformed their surfaces with underglaze patterns and metallic glazes. The natural world frequently informs my work: vine and tree bark motifs snake down arms and legs, while feet and fingers unfurl into tulip-like blooms. The artificiality is intentional and playful—a floral design, on closer inspection, resembles paisley wallpaper rather than an actual flower. Faux wood grain rests atop real wood pedestals, themselves an assemblage of unfinished blocks and elegantly lathed furniture parts.

The final pairings of sculpture and pedestal shift between balance and precariousness. Instead of serving as neutral supports, the pedestals assert their own presence, revealing traces of their previous lives. Meanwhile, sculpted hands and feet seem poised to creep beyond their slender platforms, extending into the surrounding space. As a result, the viewer becomes more aware of their own physical relationship to the work: some pieces require bending, craning, or moving around them to be fully seen. The exhibition space, with its own layers of history, adds yet another dimension to the interplay between artwork, pedestal, viewer, and environment.