Worry Stone

A dollhouse of constructed climates where leaves blow, stones sit, and seasons turn inside, folding nature and spirituality into interior décor within an emotional weather system.

My friend asked me what I’ve been making and I said, “rocks, big and small.” Scale has its own politics. Smallness forces intimate attention. The biggest change is tempo. Miniature work speeds me up—I can execute monumental ideas with very little material or effort. Physical challenges of larger-scale work disappear; adjustments in shadows, light, and material acquisition become non-issues. It’s low risk, high reward.

I’m drawn to materials with scripts—textiles, domestic objects, ornamental debris, pseudo-spiritual tools, souvenirs, lucky objects. I scavenge broadly and indiscriminately. My studio is filled with shoeboxes full of pennies, seedpods, backscratchers, stickers, keychains, etc. I have ideas of how they could be used, but they are murky. In making, you have to yield to the material constraints, so the ideas begin to change as soon as I begin to work on them. The scholar stones are made of rocks collected on the shores of Lake Superior last summer, tumbled in my studio. I got a massive bag of crayons at a yard sale. For this, I cast the rocks directly into their crayon bases, melting them with a bundle of candles from the shrine section at Many More. The leaves are made from assorted papers, old mail, paper bags, eco-printed poems, bad drawings, critical theory print-outs, expired horoscopes, joss papers, and real fallen leaves. If it fits in my leaf punch, I punched it. The found objects are promiscuous, and I’m often surprised by what sticks to what. I don’t know how they come together until living with them in my studio, letting them misbehave, clot, and contaminate each other.

Delicate bellgum pod, sea urchin shell, and mulberry paper lights, along with shelves made from rulers and beads, extend a recursive domestic logic: modular, disassemblable, exchangeable, and responsive to rearrangement. Organizing a home is recursive, repeating the same, smaller, or nested procedures to manage, maintain, and refine spaces, rather than a single, one-time project. It is a continuous loop of decluttering, staging, recluttering, storing, personalizing, tidying, and using. Even now, I’m anticipating my eviction from Almost Gallery, and have been devising new homes for the miniatures. I’m making clock-shelves, rotatable pebble paths, zen gardens that go in drawers, keeping the domestic in continuous motion.

This project was made possible with support from The Frank-Ratchye Further Fund Microgrant #2024-045. Additional images available here.