Chapters
I have a postcard my grandfather mailed to my grandmother. It cost a penny to send. The picture on the front is nothing much, some tinted scene a printer ran off by the thousand and sold off a drugstore rack.
On the back, in pencil, he wrote: Think of me.
You could not sell that postcard for a dollar. It is not fine art and it was never built to last eighty years. I would still choose it over most of what I own.
That is what this category is about.
This category—More Than Art—exists to explore what happens when we treat art not as an aesthetic object, but as a mirror. A ritual. A message.
You Already Have One
Somewhere in your house is an object doing the same job.
The ring you never wear and will not put in a drawer. A rock off a beach whose name you half remember. A shirt that stopped fitting a decade ago. Something with your mother’s handwriting on it.
You know which one it is. You did not have to think about it.
Ask what it is worth and you get two answers that have nothing to do with each other. Nobody taught you to do that. You did it anyway, and so has everyone who ever lived.
Objects Have Always Held Things
We have been doing this since we started burying our dead with what they loved. Grave goods. A coin carried in a pocket until the face wears off it. A ring standing in for a promise. A stone worn smooth by one thumb over years.
Symbols are what we reach for when something is too large or too old or too tangled to fit inside a sentence. The body recognizes them before the mind agrees to. That is why they surface in dreams you cannot account for, and in folklore that repeats itself across cultures that never met.
I have survived trauma and spent years working alongside others who have. Here is what that taught me about symbols: the aftermath echoes. Pain rearranges itself into similar shapes in different lives. So the images travel. Something I wrapped for my own reasons finds a woman I have never met, and she knows exactly what it is.
I go further into the specific elements elsewhere in this category, stone by stone and color by color. This page is the reason underneath all of it.
What Changes When You Do It on Purpose
Most objects collect meaning slowly, by accident, over years. The postcard did not begin as an heirloom. It began as mail.
I work from the other end. I put the meaning in at the front, deliberately, before the object exists. I make things to find out what I could not say any other way, and then the piece goes out into the world and stops being mine.
That is the whole claim I am making. It is a small one.
Here is what “on purpose” means in the studio:
- Every gemstone, herb, and oil is chosen for what it carries.
- Every binding choice, how I knot, layer, wrap, or shape, is a way to hold an intention in something you can pick up.
- Color speaks a virtue or exposes a truth.
- The dolls arrive with names. Sometimes one tells me what she is for after I have already planned her out, and I start over.
Symbolism arrives on its own schedule, and it is rarely accidental. It shows up when something wants to be known. That is the work: to give it form. To wrap the energy until it takes a shape. To notice when a familiar thing turns up in a new configuration.
Whether You Like It Is Yours to Decide
Some of what I make is uncomfortable to look at. Some of it was uncomfortable to make.
If a piece unsettles you, that is information. Sometimes it means the work is touching something you have not finished with. Sometimes it means you do not care for it. You are the only one who can tell which, and I would rather you trust your own read than take mine.
There is no prerequisite here, and no training in art or psychology required. You have been reading objects your whole life. You already have the equipment.
A thing has to be honest to hold weight. That is the entire requirement.
Two Pieces, So You Can See What I Mean
Butterfly.
Built for a patron living with PTSD. Decades of fault and shame had been handed to her by people who had no right to hand it over.
Butterfly works at the throat, loosening what got locked there, making room for the truth to come up when she is ready to say it out loud.
The wrappings hold one quiet instruction: Remember. The fault was never yours.
Under the Vest.
A mixed-media painting built around a single moment: an officer bleeding out in the street. She may not make it home. If she does not, everything she never said dies with her.
The piece holds the grief and the will to live in the same frame, then leaves you standing there with her.
What Is in This Category
More Than Art holds everything that asks you to feel before you explain.
Materials with Meaning. Why I choose the elements I do and what they carry.
The Story Behind the Work. How specific pieces came to be, including the decisions I could not justify at the time.
Portfolio Highlights. Dolls, drawings, and other work worth a longer look.
Start Anywhere
The portfolio is a collection of thresholds. Some are quiet. Others take up the whole room.
Pick a piece and read its story. Some will land and most will not, which is ordinary; my grandfather’s postcard means nothing to you either. Somewhere in here is an object doing the job your ring or your mother’s handwriting already does, and you will know it when you see it.
See the Full More Than Art Collection
The Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch goes out when there is something worth sending: new work, the story underneath it, and the occasional thing I am still working out. Put your name on it here.