2025

found mirrored stainless steel ball, hand tied net studded with handmade Italian soft glass beads, laminated plexiglass, found plastic crate feet, hardware, light bulb fixture, oil.

The brain is an imperfect container, it gets scrambled by grief, it doesn't know what to do with itself, with this traumatic information, these memories of the experience, whatever it may be. It deconstructs, it changes, adapts, rewires itself and builds new pathways, it continues to wrestle with this unfathomable knowledge it wished it hadn’t known or felt. It is forever changed.

Grief the sculpture is an assemblage of found and made elements combined. An example of what improvisation in the studio can look like. The mirrored ball had rolled around our apartment for years, rescued from a dumpster in the armpit of 2nd Ave in Gowanus, the orange plastic donut looking crate feet, similar had stacked in one corner or another since Brett ripped them off a smashed up plywood box on the waterfront in Red Hook. They were precious cargo, always full of promise but never quite in the right place at the right time to be put into something. Next was a sheet of laminated plexiglass Del had stockpiled waiting to be sliced up to be inlaid into a new set of our cabinet Pulls or the edge of a new dining table. This pattern we called zoom - an accent of red or orange with a trailing gradient of white through cream through a gradient of darkening blues into black and repeat linear, nice. As a sheet like this it had always felt delicious for some other use, with a sand and a polish it was in too. Some holes, some hardware and we had a structure, a stack of information and a reflection of infinite time and space in the panoramic face of this ball. Some strange hot air balloon.

The net that binds, that holds, that catches it all together and makes the work complete. The net is hand tied by Brett and studded with handmade colorful glass beads she made while learning how to flame work Italian soft glass in the hot shops of Urban Glass in downtown Brooklyn.