Materials: stoneware, oxides, underglaze

Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 5.5

Details: Some of the works may contain cracks and/or other aspects that are products of firing large, thick works. These “flaws” are considered and left and are inherent to the aesthetic of the piece.

Some words on the exhibition Maud’s Bed in which a lot of these works were shown at Hair + Nails gallery in April 2024. (Photos of by Ryan Fontaine, Emma Beatrez, and myself.)

There is a piece in the show that is a small clay rendition of the Canadian artist, Maud Lewis’s, bed. I was able to see her bed in person, long after her death. Maud Lewis painted, painted, painted, every day. She was born with a disability which would make it difficult to use her hands to paint, but that didn’t stop her. She lived her life in poverty with her fisherman husband. Maud died in 1970 and her husband passed away 9 years later. The house they shared had once stood left to decay in rural Nova Scotia, until it was resuscitated by enthusiasts and presented at the art museum in Halifax, where it became part of the permanent collection. The entire home was transported and put back together exactly how it stood when her husband died. A monument/replica of the house now sits on the original site. It is really the size of a shack. I think often about when I looked right into her house at the museum and saw her bed first – how this was once her private place that we all get to see now. I’m drawn to other beds too, such as Antoni Tàpies’ Llit Obert and Tracey Emin’s My Bed. Conceptually diverse, but each referencing this same place that to me feels vulnerable, loaded and lonely.  

 Other subjects and places explored in this body of work: a crowd of anonymous people with Eames house colors; 2 Ukrainian women smoking; a sink from a café in the country of Georgia; a boy jumping rope; a sailor smoking a pipe; confused lottery ticket scratcher (did not win); a girl considering her new womanly self with hands on hips; a nameless nun; Salt n’ Pepa, etc. Many of these serve as souvenirs of my experience, influences of my formation, objects for the viewer to wonder how they fit into the context of their surroundings, which mostly they do not.

 I’ve also been thinking about waterflow as a metaphor for life experience – the draining downhill into a bigger body of water. There is a song by artist Antônio Carlos Jobim called Águas de março, which translates in English to Waters of March. It was a chart-topper in Brazil, although universally overplayed, but I still always turn it up when I hear it. Águas de março, as described in its Wikipedia entry “doesn’t so much tell a story, but rather presents a series of images (“a stick, a stone, a sliver of glass, a scratch, a cliff, a knot in the wood, a fish, a pin, the end of the road, and many other things …”) that form a collage.” Likewise in the exhibition, one can imagine the objects as momentary descriptors, functioning akin to the lyrics, referencing the artist’s muses, influences and references. Maud’s Bed features a watershed of pop stars, a memorable piece of furniture, bits of food left at the table, residue from poignant conversation. A hermetic logic bridges the disparate pieces, connecting gaps in time and space, yet also registers as memento mori, a reminder of life’s passing, or a season’s end, such as the rains of March in Brazil herald the end of summer.