Working in clay
These clay forms are not conceived from sketches or external images. They emerge through dialogue with the material itself. I begin without a predetermined destination, allowing each gesture to reveal the next. The work unfolds organically, discovering its own necessity through touch, gravity, pressure, and time.
This process reflects the Taoist understanding that form arises from wu—the generative openness often translated as absence or non-being. Presence is never fixed; it is continually becoming.
Modern physics offers a parallel imagination. The universe is woven from invisible fields whose and where interactions briefly become visible as particles, light, and matter. Electrons exist not as fixed objects but as probabilities until they enter into relationship. Likewise, sunlight carries streams of photons across immense distances before their energy is absorbed by leaf, stone, water, or skin. Reality is not static substance but continuous emergence.
These sculptures attempt to inhabit that threshold between the unseen and the seen. Their cavities, folds, and textured surfaces speak as much through what is withheld as through what is formed. The vessel becomes less a container than an event—a record of matter discovering itself.
Each piece is therefore an act of becoming: the movement from potential into presence, from silence into form, from absence into the fleeting appearance of being.
Art by Kate W 